* * * * *
                                        
 “There was no deity involved, Mr. Scott. It was my cross circuiting to B that
                                  saved them.”
                                        
I'm not sure where my mistake was [1], but I ripped out the DHCP (Dynamic
Host Configuration Protocol) settings, added them back in with one small
difference (the DHCP settings are tagged with a name, which I originally had
as LAN_ACCESS but renamed it 10.10.10.0/24) and that seemed to do the trick—
DHCP was working fine under IOS [2] 12.3. Why that fixed things, I don't
know. Maybe I knocked some bits loose or something. 

Now, testing DHCP and NAT (Network Address Translation) on the Cisco router—
that proved to be a bit more challenging. I needed one computer to act as an
upstream, and another one to test that DHCP and NAT were working. Getting a
few computers wasn't the problem. Getting a few computers that worked without
issues was the problem. It was mostly networking issues. One, my Linux
laptop, with a supposedly 10/100Mbps (Megabits per second) interface, refused
to link to the 10Mbps port on the router. And the Windows laptop … well …
yeah, it's Windows, running a few different firewalls that all needed to be
shut off, and extraneous interfaces (such as the wireless interface) shut off
and … 

Ick. 

Anyway, router is good to go. 

I hope. 

Also, I talked to Smirk about the non-automatic routing changes that have to
happen at F. Smirk's answer to that? If that's the way it works, that's the
way it works. 

Oh well. 

I can only hope that the problems F is experiencing are due to an overloaded
consumer grade router and that once this Cisco goes into place, there won't
be any more issues. 

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2008/07/13.1
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS

Email author at sean@conman.org