we have internet

Sunday, September 01, 2002, at 08:19PM

By Eric Richardson

So we have internet now... And what do I do the day after cable is installed? I break my computer. It's fixed now, but click to read of my fun.

Yesterday afternoon AT&T showed up again, and these installers were much more determined to get things done. It wasn't really a question; they were here to get the job done. Now we have a cable modem.

So instead of buying a cheap linksys router or something like that, I decide "hey, I've got two NICs in my computer, why not do IP masq myself?" Of course, the last time I set about doing this was at latest in the early 2.2 kernel days, and ipchains has been replaced with netfilter and iptables, which I of course don't have in my kernel.

Long story short, I broke stuff trying to remedy that. I didn't rerun /sbin/lilo on changing a System.map file (I think that's what caused it, at least), and LILO went to crap on me. Not only did it go to crap, it refused to come back even when rerun from a rescue cd. I got no farther than the ever-fun, ever-feared LI error. No matter how many times I tried, or what partitions I tried booting off of, LI wouldn't go away.

So I jumped the sinking LILO ship. I booted up with Linuxcare's cool rescue cd, insmoded scsi and my tulip driver (for ethernet), mounted my drives, chrooted into my /, and proceeded to download, compile, and install GRUB. Despite having very little idea what I was doing, I successfully booted from GRUB. My commands to boot looked something like that following:

root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.19 root=/dev/sdb1
boot

Not exactly fun in the sun, but it works, and I'm not complaining.

So now I have a working ip masq installation, as well as cool extras like an internal DHCP server.