On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 20:58 +0200, Nigel Henry wrote: > This is my setup. I have 2 machines on a LAN. These access the Internet > through a Smoothwall firewall, which is installed on an old machine. The > Smoothwall accesses the Internet through a serial modem. To connect to > Internet I have to have one of the machines on the LAN booted up, so as > access the web interface to the Smoothwall. > > So this is the way it goes. The Smoothwall is left running continually, but I > shut down the dialup connection, and the 2 machines on the LAN last thing at > night, unless I'm doing updates. > > Next day. Smoothwall is still running, but no connection to the Internet. Next > I boot the machine on the LAN that has the Internet timeservers listed > in /etc/ntp.conf. The machine boots up (this is FC2) , but because no > Internet connection is available the ntpd times out, goes out to lunch, gives > up trying to contact the timeservers, whatever. Post boot up, and running > ntpq> pe, sometimes there is 1 of the 6 timeservers showing, and sometimes 4 > of the 6. I would run a NTP server on the smoothwall machine, and rig a way for it to restart itself after the connection is up again, automatically. One method might be to use a script to go back-online, and that same script issue a restart to the NTP server. Then, I would point all the LAN PCs to use that smoothwall machine as their NTP server. That keeps all your LAN in step with each other, only one machine hassles external NTP servers (good etiquette), and no internal LAN PC has a slow bootup. -- (This box runs FC6, my others run FC4 & FC5, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
