Funky home network set-up giving me trouble??

[stecca]

Using the Network Troubleshooter, I failed step 5 - Router is reachable?. Here's a paste to help troubleshoot: http://amahi.pastebin.com/6hE3aHcs

Little background on the network...

Modem -> landlord's router (with his own LAN) -> OLD airport extreme ( with my LAN and wireless b/g) -> NEW Dual-band Airport Extreme (for wireless n) -> server (with a little luck)

kinda new to linux, fedora, and amahi...thanks in advance!

[JasonWard]

Well your HDA and your Gateway seem to be on different subnets

Gateway 10.8.0.2/255.255.255.0
HDA 10.0.1.10/255.255.255.0

The whole purpose of a Gateway is to allow you to talk to machines not on your subnet, hence a gateway must always be on your subnet or the machines on that subnet are doomed to just to talk to each other and no more.

It would appear your desktop "h001.nest.com (10.0.1.1)" is connected to the HDA over a real network connection, whereas it's connection to the Gateway is over some form of private tunnel.

Now it gets a little difficult without really seeing your network topology, but I can already see that a lot of things are not going to work.

It seems that your LAN is 10.0.1.0/24 (or 10.0.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0) and that your landlords LAN is 10.8.0.0/24 (or 10.8.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0) and that your LAN's gateway is infact your machine "h001.nest.com (10.0.1.1)"

So to get the HDA to work at all you must set your gateway to 10.0.1.1

HOWEVER, unless your landlord has multiple public IP's assigned to his router, and he has your machine set as the DMZ for that IP address things like VPN termination and using your HDA to provide any sort of service to anyone on the internet (including you at work etc) is going to be pretty much impossible.

I would suggest talking your landlord, and hoping he knows about networks and is willing to pay for the extra services needed, either that or getting your own internet connection installed.

Note: Some of what I said doesn't fit with

Modem -> landlord's router (with his own LAN) -> OLD airport extreme ( with my LAN and wireless b/g) -> NEW Dual-band Airport Extreme (for wireless n) -> server (with a little luck)

but instead fits with what I can see in the pastebin... however, the main thrust of what I say still hold true either way, if the details need tweaking.

[stecca]

Jason, thanks for the help, but i don't think my current networking background is strong enough to understand everything you've posted.

It seems that your LAN is 10.0.1.0/24 (or 10.0.1.0 mask 255.255.255.0) and that your landlords LAN is 10.8.0.0/24 (or 10.8.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0)

actually, the landlord's LAN is 192.168.1.1. I'm not sure what the 10.8.0.0 is...in fact, in the few weeks i've been messin' with this that address has not once shown up (except when working through the troubleshooter).

I'm not confident with the set-up of the LAN, nor is my landlord skilled with networks.

Maybe someone can verify this set-up as potentially workable? I'm sure there will be settings that need adjusting, but can someone hold my hand a bit?

Modem -> landlord's router (with his own LAN) -> OLD airport extreme ( with my LAN and wireless b/g) -> NEW Dual-band Airport Extreme (for wireless n) -> server (with a little luck)

The new airport extreme is in bridge mode, so (if i've got this right) when setting up Amahi prior to install it's the credentials of the OLD airport extreme that i need to identify, yes? Can someone explain any issues i need to address due to the fact that my LAN is hardwired into my landlord's LAN? Do i need to set up a static ip for my LAN router on his side to make this work? If anyone has the time to explain what to do and why it should be done i would appreciate it!

[JasonWard]

Looking at your pastebin, your computer "Tower" has two gateways

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Destination Gateway Genmask Flags MSS Window irtt Iface 10.8.0.2 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 tun0 10.0.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 10.8.0.0 10.8.0.2 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 tun0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 10.0.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

One at 10.0.1.1 and another 10.8.0.2, to the best of my knowledge, that just means the computer "Tower" spends a lot of time confused, but I'm not sure how it effects a Linux computer, I've only ever "achevied" that on Windows machine, and it really didn't like it.

It's from your pastebin that I also see the 10.8.0.0/24 network. However since you don't know what it is, I will ignore it for the rest of my reply BUT it could be the source of many problems, if you can, and your sure its not needed, get rid of it from "Tower". It's associated with a network adaptor called "tun0" which strongly implies that this 10.8.0.0/24 network is somehow a VPN or some other software implemented tunnel.

What I expect Towers routing table to look like (netstat -nr) is

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10.0.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 0.0.0.0 10.0.1.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth0

The way you illustrate your network implies that traffic flows from your landlords router, to your router, to the b/g airpot to the n airport and then to the HDA. As per this diagram:

ahami.png (37.5 KiB) Viewed 2853 times

Now if that's all configured correctly, that will work, but its about as inefficient a setup as you could dream up, it also seems redundant, as to act as a bridge to the b/g wireless the n wireless must also be able to talk in b/g mode, in which case just throw away from the b/g wireless and plug the n wireless into your router directly. On the other hand, I actually suspect the n wireless isnt talking to the b/g wireless at all, and is infact connected directly to your router, in which case we should just ignore your b/g wireless for this discussion as it has no role to play.

Also from your pastebin I see

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Step 3: Your router IP address is 10.0.1.2

and

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[Stecca@Tower ~]$ traceroute -q 1 -m 5 router traceroute to router (10.0.1.1), 5 hops max, 60 byte packets 1 h001.nest.com (10.0.1.1) 0.616 ms

Well thats problem, you've told Ahami that your router is 10.0.1.2 but the DNS resolves your router to 10.0.1.1 (which also concurs with your routing table/netstat -nr and with your ARP table

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h003.nest.com (10.0.1.3) at 00:26:bb:1e:51:3c [ether] on eth0 h001.nest.com (10.0.1.1) at 00:03:93:e7:3e:c8 [ether] on eth0

which shows there is a device at 10.0.1.1 but doesn't know of any device at 10.0.1.2 You need to fix that. I suggest just by telling Ahami that your router is at 10.0.1.1 and reinstalling the HDA.

If you do that, your HDA should be able to talk to the router and things will start to work.

However, there are some issues for you to think about and perhaps resolve

1. Why are you segregating your LAN from your landlords? In the current setup, and given your landlord is no networking expert, whilst your computers and information are somewhat safe from him, you on the other hand have full and unfettered access to his network. For simplicty and ease of use, I would just use his network and forget about yours.

2. If you insist on having your network behind a firewall, you need to consider do you want to be able to connect to your network (devices on your network) from the internet? If so you got some things to do. Depending on your landlords ISP, his (or your) willingness to pay and the abilties of his router then the best solution would be to get more IP addresses assigned to his router, and then to use one of those for your LAN, and have his router direct all traffic on that IP to your router.

But that could be costly and or impossible (with your Landlords ISP, router etc) in which case you are either going to have to live without inbound services, or you are going to have to persaude your landlord to make your router his DMZ (if his router can do that) in which case any inbound traffic his router doesnt specifically recognise as being for his network, will be forward to your router, but should your landlord already have some inbound services of his own setup, then you might be out of luck unless you can move your inbound services to other ports.

Edit: switched "quote" for "code" to preserve formatting and ease of reading.

[stecca]

It seems like all these routers are adding too many variables to the situation.

While I can't just use the landlord's router (he'd have wires all over his house!) I can, at least, take the old airport extreme out of the equation and try from there.

There is also a wifi card in the Tower that isn't being use. I'm gonna get that out as well...streamline the system and slowly add in the extras as needed AFTER things work.

Jason - thanks for all your help. I feel like I've got a much better handle on the situation after your explanations. I'll get going on this and post results.

[JasonWard]

If there is no privacy/security reason why you cannot connected directly to your landlords network, then just connected the new airport to his router and bridge to his network. That would simplify things greatly.

If at all possible, you really don't want the HDA (or any server, but especially a media or file server) connected over wireless, if you have a client and your streaming say HD content from a wireless server to wireless laptop, it will be too slow, much slower than you expect, and much slower than the marketeers of various wireless companies would have you believe.