USB Networking troubles

[Andrew C. Dingman]

> This is posted with the hope someone can look at the current state of
> my Freerunner connection to the desktop and just see something that is
> not right. I am sure the answer is simple and am reluctant to ask the
> community for non-FR help but perhaps others are struggling with
> similar network issues in getting their FR hooked up to the Internet.
> 
> My basic setup:
> router - 192.168.1.1
> desktop - 192.168.1.200
> freerunner - 192.168.1.202

You mean it looks something like this:

192.168.1.1             192.168.1.200      192.168.1.202
router--------switch-------desktop----------freerunner
             /
            /
       other_stuff
       192.168.1.x     

and everything on the left has a netmask of 255.255.255.0?

If that's so forget about the FreeRunner talking to anything but the
desktop. In fact, be suprised and grateful if it's doing that much. The
routing table you gave is horrible and it will stop working if you
re-start the non-usb network interface on your machine. You need
different subnets on the two desktop NICs to have any hope. The only
possible way around this fact is to use ethernet bridging instead of
routing on the desktop, and that's such an ugly hack that I refuse to
work up directions for configuring it. I've never seen it done on a
network that worked right.

Your desktop needs to act as a ROUTER for the FreeRunner. A router by
definition is connected to two or more *different* networks. From the
perspective of the stuff on the left, the 192.168.1.192/26 subnet the
FreeRunner is on is not a different network - it's a few addresses on
the same network. (This is what netmasks are about. Basically, they tell
the computer how big the neighborhood is.) Which means they aren't
sending packets for the FreeRunner through the desktop, they're just
ARPing and expecting the FreeRunner to respond, but since it's on a
different network, it can't hear the ARPs. Packets from the FreeRunner
probably do reach their destinations, but the reply packets don't come
back, which means you don't get a ping response and can't establish any
kind of connection.

The easiest way to fix this is probably to use your half-working setup
to SSH into the FreeRunner and reconfigure it to use, say,
192.168.2.202, then do the same with the desktop side of the USB
ethernet connection. Then kill the iptables rules in your nat table
POSTROUTING chain. You can either:

1) Leave them gone and put a static route to 192.168.2.192/26 in your
router, specifying your desktop's 192.168.1.x address as the gateway

OR (exclusive, do not do both of these things)

2) specify on the desktop an iptables rule to NAT all packets coming
from the USB network - something like 'iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s
192.168.2.192/26 -j MASQUERADE'.

Whichever you choose, you'll need the FORWARD chain in the filter table
in its current permissive state. You'll also want to double-check that
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1. The simplest way to check this is
'cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward'.

Hope that helps.