[gentoo-user] Connection to linux server dying on both connected devices

[Mark Shields]

Hello list.  I've been reading this mailing list for a while now and have
taken great pleasure in reading some of these e-mails.  But now the time has
come for me to present a problem I hope you all can help me with.  I
recently reinstalled Gentoo (stage3) after my hard drive crashed in my
server (it sounded like the hard drive arm was waltzing across the
platters).  I followed the home router guide,
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml, as I've done before, and
as before I emerged dhcp instead of using dnsmasq as my dhcp server.  Ever
since I reinstalled I've had a problem where I've had to disable/enable my
NIC in windows and powercycle my MTA (Motorola vt1004, Vonage) to get a
connection; if I attempt to traceroute from my Windows XP box it gives the
error "request timed out".  I thought it was something wrong with the DHCP
server so I set static IPs on both the MTA and Windows box, but I woke up
this morning and it is still doing it. Again, I had to disable/enable my NIC
in windows and powercycle my MTA to get the connection working on both the
windows box and the MTA.  No cables had to be unplugged/replugged and
nothing else reset.

Any suggestions?

--
- Mark Shields