Understanding default gateway & routing... 1

[Finchmore]

Hi,

I have recently set up a new server in a DMZ connecting through a firewall to our LAN. Although I seem to have some connectivity from the DMZ to WAN (i.e. internet access) and connectivity through to parts of our LAN, I'm not completely convinced I've set the default gateway settings correctly for the new server. When I try and ping the firewall from the new server I get a "Hardware Error" message. If I ping the firewall internally from the LAN I have no problems at all.

I've read quite a-bit about "route" and "route print" commands but as I'm quite new to Server 2003 I'm not sure if these are commands I must run during setup or are just optional. In addition, how do I know what IP address to use for the default gateway (firewall) bearing in mind it already has an internal address allocated from the LAN scope?

For your info.

LAN scope between 192.168.200.0 & 192.168.200.254
Default Gateway = 192.168.200.2

Server in DMZ scope between 192.168.0.0 & 192.168.0.254
Default Gateway = 192.168.0.2

Look forward to hearing from someone please!

 

[sab4you]

If your pinging the server from the DMZ to your external side of the firewall, thats not unexpected for it to not respond good. The firewall maybe setup to block ping requests.

As for what is a gateway, the best way I see it, its a place to send requests outside your network.

lets say your network is 192.168.0.0 subnet mask 255.255.255.0. If you send anything to 192.168.0.x it will be on the same network and can find it. If you try to send to another ip, such as to 54.33.33.2 it knows its outside your network and then it looks for your gateway IP address as a place to send this request.

As for using the route command, no its not a normal setup thing to do.

Let say you have your server on the DMZ and you want it to resolve a totally different network range, but you do not have any routers in between them. Then you can add a route to that network using the route command.

 

[Finchmore]

Many thanks for the feedback Sab4you, that all makes sense... great stuff...