[Rimmer100]

Hello,

About a year ago I got fed up of the crappy speeds I was getting through my Netgear RP614 (V2) router, and as I had spare bits around I set up a computer as a router instead. I found a guide (which has since gone, alas) about using Fedora Core 4 as the OS. At this point it was just really proof of concept so I went along with it. Followed the guide through and ended up with much better speeds and no baulking of the modem when I fired up uTorrent.

A year later (now) I got bored of the whine from the fans and decided to do the same thing again in minature. So I built a little baby mini-ITX machine based on an EPIA PD 6000E motherboard. Instead of a hard disk I've used a 4GB compact flash card and this time I opted for Fedora Core 6. I know this isn't the latest but Fedora 7 doesn't link my CF / CF-IDE combo.

Anyway it was a fight getting it up and running (especially as the guide no longer exists) and it all works fine. For a while. I'm an old NTL customer with an STB. It's the Samsung SMT-2100C. So I had to go through the provisioning service. It was a fight to get the new box registered, but I put this down to the problems in DA7 last week (seemed it was on the service problems phoneline nearly all week). Today I thought I'd have another stab at using it. Rebooted the STB and it got a 10.x.x.x address. Rebooted the router and ended up with an 81.x.x.x address. Super.

It was fine for a while, I was messing around trying to get upnp working on it, and then suddenly I was no longer getting webpages up. Check ifconfig and eth0 has got a bloody 10.x.x.x address again.

This hasn't only happened today, it was happening last week as well, but as I said I thought that was the DA7 issues.

So here's the weird thing. This hasn't happened with my Fedora Core 4 setup and that's being running beautifully for over a year now. I know there has been a bit of a leap between the FC4 & FC7. So is there a configuration issue here with maybe dhclient on the FC6 router? Any ideas of what I can try. I have done all the removing and re-registering about a thousand times, so I can't think it's that. I could try spoofing the Mac of the FC4 router but a) I don't know how to and b) I shouldn't really need to.

I know it's a bit of a long shot posting on here, but I was wondering if any Linux Gurus out there have any ideas.

I highly recommend the whole Linux box as a router idea though. The most noticeable difference was the latency drop on gaming servers. For UK ones I tend to get around 10ms when I was around 30ms on the same servers through the Netgear (yes I know latency isn't everything). It also just seems to be a bit snappier. Not to mention it can do other stuff like cache dns entries, be a web cache, sftp server, ntp server, web server etc etc.

Ian