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I will be abroad until June 2008, and before departure I bought an expensive NetGear FVG318 router (in order to ensure a safe connection for my Bubba, which is running my mail server for example). However, the router seems to be a real piece of junk, as I think it stopped working the day I left. My parents went to my apartment, and tried to get it to work again, following my instructions. After working on it now and then during a month, they finally got it to work, a few days ago. But today, it once again stopped responding. My Bubba is running a script which should update the DNS server if there is any change to the IP address. The problem cannot be with only that program, as my Bubba also stopped seeding some torrents.

Now I have had it. I am tired of working for hours and hours with this, and am planning to disconnect the router and plugging the Bubba directly to the broadband connection. The problem is that I told my parents to try this, but I still could not access it. Is there any particular steps I should take to do this? Is it safe to connect the Bubba like that, or would I expose myself to hackers, for example?

The second question regards the download service. I installed XSP to make some tests, but then I could not access Bubba via HTTP at all. I uninstalled XSP and after some tweaking I got Apache to work again. However, I cannot access the download service in web-admin. It says something like "The download service is not running" (but I cannot check the exact working because of my connections problems). A few hours ago the Bubba seeded torrents, so obviously it was running. Do anyone know what the problem might be?

Thanks!

This happens to me occasionally, I use a cheap, Belkin router and it can go for months and months without failing and then twice in a week it will lose connection with the outside world and need to be rebooted. The log files to tell me what went wrong on this router are very poor.

Originally I thought it was some hack-bot on the outside which was throwing lots of illegal requests at it, however I attended a computer security course and used all their tools to blast away at every vunerability on Bubba and everything coped well. (Indeed, Bubba's security level was much higher then some well known websites out there !)

I sort of now suspect my ADSL router or my ISP service which may be causing things to fail.

Incidently, I have a Netgear Wireless Access Point and that will crash at least once a week.

Thanks, Clive, for your information about the security. However, the Bubba will still not connect to the Internet, if it cannot do it through the router. (I use the Swedish Bredbandsbolaget, with a dynamic IP address.) The only reason I can think of is that Bubba only accepts IP addresses on the form 192.168.x.y. Could that be the case?

I still have problems with the downloads page in web-admin, but never got a reply. Should I write it in a separate post, perhaps?

If you stick bubba on the net with an ISP which gives you a dynamic IP, you have to turn on dhcp on the bubba.
you can check it is turned on turn it on by editing this file

iface eth0 inet dhcp

restart the network cheers
Eek

PS. yes, best to make a new post for the downloads page in web-admin issue

Eek wrote:turn it on by editing this file

iface eth0 inet dhcp

Ok, now I edited the file so it looks like this: I think it will be ok, but I just want to ask before I restart so that I won't be stuck abroad without a working server again. Should I have removed the previous lines?

Should/could I configure Bubba to assume a static IP address if it cannot get a DHCP address? The file looked like this before I edited it: Thank you for your help!

It looks good.

But indeed better safe then recover.
So why not put the static IP back, so you can access the bubba using that and create virtual IP using DHCP.
so your /etc/network/interfaces file should look like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.1.9
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

auto eth0:0
iface eth0:0 inet dhcp

Now let's try to bring up the second IP you can check the IP you got with cheers
Eek

Sorry,

just found out that for some reason the dhcp must be on the actual eth.
so make sure your /etc/network/interfaces looks like:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

auto eth0:0
iface eth0:0 inet static
address 192.168.1.9
network 192.168.1.0
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.1

Then restart the network