[johngrinham]

In my job as a telephone systems installer (mostly NEC), the line between traditional telephony and IP telephony is blurring rapidly. An installation I'm currently working on involves sites from Darwin to Lismore (with me somewhere in the middle). These sites will all be linked with IP trunks. I have a freebsd (4.8) box with two nic cards which I thought I might be able to use to test these systems before they leave the workshop. I can test them on one subnet, but in the real world they will be in different subnets (controlled by Telstra) and require gateways so I thought it would be nice if I could configure these two nics as the gateways for each system.
In rc.conf I have the nics set with IPs and gateway="enable". From freebsd console I can ping both nics and both systems attached to the nics, but if I connect to one side with a laptop, I can only ping three. The standard setup in rc.conf does no more than allocate IP's to the nics, a default router address, and enable gateway. Do I need to add routes.? Will the single default gateway be an issue, or is what I'm thinking not possible.
+---laptop
|
freebsd----+-----rl0=10.10.20.254 -----switch------system 10.10.20.100
|
+-----rl1=10.10.21.254 -----------------system 10.10.21.100

freebsd can see both nics and both systems
laptop can only see 20.100, 20.254, 21.254

can I treat the 254 addresses as gateways from each system?