Hypothetical network cloud

[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?

[DutchDaemon]

Is your laptop connected to rl0, and does it have a 10.10.20.x address? Try adding a static route to 10.10.21.0/24 with 10.10.21.254 as the gateway.

[johngrinham]

Originally Posted by DutchDaemon

Is your laptop connected to rl0, and does it have a 10.10.20.x address? Try adding a static route to 10.10.21.0/24 with 10.10.21.254 as the gateway.

Yes, sorry the diagram moved, the laptop is on the switch.
so if I added this to rc.conf

static_routes="lan1 lan2"
route_lan1="-net 10.10.21.0/24 10.10.21.254"
route_lan2="-net 10.10.20.0/24 10.10.20.254"

would that that allow me to put the laptop either side and still see everything
assuming a netmask of 255.255.255.0 on all devices ?
Could it be that simple ?

[DutchDaemon]

That should work, I think. Traffic not destined for either of those networks would use the default gateway though.

[johngrinham]

Originally Posted by DutchDaemon

That should work, I think. Traffic not destined for either of those networks would use the default gateway though.

For my testing the two phone systems will be the only traffic, I'll give it a go, thank you

[johngrinham]

It was that simple.!
I got both systems talking to each other on a switch as a B class network, then changed each system to C class which killed connectivity (good).
Put the freeBsd machine between them and connectivity returned. This is one piece of junk that isn't going to the dump any time soon :-)

Thanks for the help

[DutchDaemon]

Cheers.