Serendipity
Originally posted 2004-08-11 12:49:00
Recently, my company purchased a Sun 420R for testing purposes, so I’ve been installing software on and configuring it. For some reason, it couldn’t get out to the Internet, though it saw the local network fine (aha! a clue!). I get together with our sysadmin, who knows virtually nothing about *nix but is a Windows whiz, and we pored through Linux books (we don’t have any Solaris ones) and man pages, and finally determined:
- The default gateway wasn’t set, and
- How to set the default gateway
We set the default gateway, and then everything worked.
Yesterday, I decided to purchase and install SUSE Professional 9.1 on my wife’s computer. She runs Windows XP, but I had previously slapped an extra hard drive into it and had installed Mandrake 10.0 on the second drive. X kept locking up, however, and then Linux quit booting, and since my wife gives me the stink eye if I keep her from her e-mail for longer than 10 minutes, I never bothered to try to diagnose or solve the problem. Since it’s my only Linux desktop test bed, however, I needed to get it going again.
I stopped at CompUSA on my way home from work last night, bought SUSE, and installed it while my wife was out. When I was done . . . I couldn’t get out on the Internet. I could see the local network just fine, however. Sound familiar? Indeed, the default gateway wasn’t set, so the fix was quick and I was up and running.
The real question: why didn’t SUSE automatically set the default gateway when it got its IP address from the DHCP server? Debian, Windows XP, and Mac OS X seem to manage it just fine . . . .