connection between Freerunner and openSUSE 11.2

[arne anka]

tbh, i never really was happy mit nm or any "intelligent" automatism  
trying to manage the connection to the fr.
nm usually is overcharged with the concept of _multiple_ network  
interfaces being up and connected at the sam time and produces spretty  
much a mess.

your best bet is to handle it by yourself, using /etc/network/interfaces  
(be aware, taht suse since its earliest times refuse to use sensible and  
widely used mechanisms, but forces you to use that horrible yast!)

my /etc/network/interfaces looks like below

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

allow-hotplug usb0
iface usb0 inet static
         address 192.168.0.200
         netmask 255.255.255.0
         network 192.168.0.0
         post-up iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE -s  
192.168.0.0/24
         post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
         post-up iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

## The primary network interface
## network-manager stupidly seems to use the last defined connection
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

relevant is the usb0 stanza (i modified the udev rule to retain the device  
usb0, per default it should be ethX, probably eth1 on your box).

in theory, nm should ignore any device explicitely configured in the file  
above, but in praxi it usually fails, check
/etc/NetworkManager/nm-system-settings.conf
for the entry

[ifupdown]
managed=false

to (hopefully) force nm to ignore those devices in /etc/network/interfaces.

this works on a debian/unstable.
if suse does not allow this kind of configuration (yast creates its own  
little world), try yast and configure there manually the necessary  
information.