Networking problem

Happy New Year to all! I’m working my way through the setup procedure (RPCEmu 0.8.8/RO 4.02) on Windows 7 and have arrived at the configuration of the RO interface e.g. Network-Configuration-Interfaces. The Interfaces dialogue box is greyed-out, preventing further progress. Can anyone explain why this might be, and how to fix it? I know the dialogue works normally because on a previous attempt I did actually get past this stage (failure then was due to attempting to bridge to a wireless network on the Windows side which I’ve since altered to wired). I think the Autosense directory may be implicated. Cheers,
George

Have you checked the Rpcemu list archives?

I had similar problems and thn realised you have to merge !System and !Boot which are in rpcemu/riscos-progs/EtherRPCEm which allow the interfaces to come up. HTH

Thanks to all for the replies. I got past the Interfaces issue and now have fully set-up RPCEmu networking. The only(!) problem is, I can’t connect to the internet: ping -c fails with 100% packet loss. I think the problem is on the Win 7 side, but needless to say, the Windows diagnostic tools are about as much use in this case as a chocolate teapot. So apologies for the following digression into Windows 7 networking …. I have a wired connection WinPC-to-router, set up on fixed IP addresses. Wireless is available but disabled. There are 3 elements to the Windows setup: Local Area Connection, rpcemu, and the Network Bridge. The LAN and rpcemu report themselves as enabled but not connected, and identify themselves as part of the Network Bridge, which reports itself as connected. The internet works on the Windows machine. As far as I can see, the RPCEmu networking instructions have been complied-with on the Windows side. I’m determined to have a fully-functional (i.e., internet enabled) RISC OS emulator on this PC!

You have configured your default gateway and dns in !InetSetup for your router George? I didn’t turn of WiFi on my laptop and Windows 7 didn’t detect the internet on the ethernet connection. So RPCEmu was connected via cable while Windows used the wireless! Netsurf was very fast loading pages. :)

@A.C.Daniel: default gateway and dns in !InetSetup are correctly configured, I believe; ifconfig a at the ROS command prompt gives identical values for RPCEmu in my setup as in the manual. I think the problem lies with the OpenVPN installation on my Win7 machine: the LAN and the network bridge show that packets are being sent and received, whereas ‘rpcemu’ shows values for packets ‘sent’ but none for ‘received’. I’ve tried static IPs on the bridge settings as well as automatic allocation; not sure where to go from here, TBH :(.

OTOH, you obviously managed to get there – maybe we should correspond privately (I’m aware this thread has gone off-topic as I’m not using RO 5/RPCEmu!).
George.

Not sure what happened there: the struck-out text should read:
a at the ROS command prompt gives identical values for RPCEmu in my setup as in the manual. I think the problem lies with the OpenVPN installation on my Win7 machine: the LAN and the network bridge show that packets are being sent and received, whereas ‘rpcemu’ shows values for packets ‘sent’ but none for ‘received’. I’ve tried static IPs on the bridge settings as well as automatic allocation; not sure where to go from here, TBH :(.

Not sure what happened there

That’s Textile’s markup thinking your hyphens are to strikethrough.

George have you given the same ip address to RPCEmu and the OpenVPN Tap32 port? I must say I was shocked when it worked first time as I had tried and failed before on my xp pro desktop pc. Have you tried turning your firewall off? I have McAfee and that seems quite happy with it.

Sending this from NetSurf on RPCEmu :-). As it happens, I’m using different IP addresses for all my network entities: the router, network bridge, rpcemu and the wireless LAN to which the host PC is also connected. The bridge and rpcemu are connected by wire to the router. The key to successful operation (I think) was ensuring that the wired and wireless connections did not conflict: the former is on fixed IP addresses, the latter automatically assigned, achieved by careful setting-up of the ipv4 and ipv6 properties on the Windows side. One other point; the Windows netsh interface settings must seemingly be reset at the command line if the host computer goes to sleep, even if no reboot occurs: the rpcemu interface address is reassigned after each wake-up of the host computer, and the weakhost settings must be reconfigured. Firewall: I too have McAfee and it doesn’t pose a problem either.
The only regret is not being able to network RO 5.17 which is far preferable to 4.02 IMHO; hopefully the RPCEmu developers will enable this feature in the not-too-distant future, and when they do, I would be happy to do some testing.
George

I’ve only ever had to enter the netsh commands once, which I did running the command line as administrator.

Hmm. I find that every time I enter ‘netsh interface ipv4 show interface’ at the Win7 command line, a different Idx comes up for the network bridge. Do you have DHCP enabled on your browser? Is the PC connecting on an automatically assigned or a fixed IP address?

Yes I do have DHCP on for the wifi, the ethernet port and the bridge I think I’ve tried both with and without. I have also deleted and recreated the bridge, disabled it and the tap32 adaptor, all without having to re-enter any netsh commands.

You’re right; I was mistaken about the necessity of re-entering netsh commands: my RPCEmu network setup seems to be stable between reboots of both RCPEmu and the host PC. However: I find shutting down and restarting RPCEmu from the RPCEmu desktop does cause the network to go offline, RPCEmu has to be quit and restarted from the Windows taskbar for networking to function correctly – have you found the same?

Yes George my Windows 7 RPCEmu setup behaves exactly the same. Had another go with my XP pro box and got nowhere at all!

I don’t know if anyone is doing online banking using RPCEmu + NetSurf but I find I can’t access the Barclays bank site: the browser times out. The same version of NetSurf on the Iyonix works fine with this site. All the other (non-banking) sites I’ve tried via RPCEmu/NetSurf work fine – I had no problem logging on here, for instance. Any ideas/explanations?

Is this the reason?

Quite possibly. Do you advise adding ‘sysctl -ew net.inet.tcp.rfc1644=0’ to !Boot.Choices.Internet.User bearing in mind I’m on RO4.02 rather than 5.xx?

Do you advise adding ‘sysctl -ew net.inet.tcp.rfc1644=0’ to !Boot.Choices.Internet.User bearing in mind I’m on RO4.02 rather than 5.xx?

Yes, absolutely regardless of which RISC OS version you’re using.

There is another version of the above statement somewhere (I’m not at home to look it up, and I can’t think where to find it on the Internet) that redirects the OS’s response to null so that it doesn’t open a TaskWindow, dialogue box or the like, which might be handy because you don’t care what the OS says. You just want it to do it and not talk back to you. It’s not a problem, you just might think you’re being alerted about something, and you really don’t care what it says.

You can just issue the command in a TaskWindow right now to test whether it solves the problem.

If it does, you can put the statement in and sort out the niceties later.

Cheers, Dave: that worked a treat. Now up and running with online banking!