Applications use the "wrong" IP address

Hello,

I have a weird problem. My system has two network adapters, one with a 192.x address and one with a 10.x address. I connect to the Internet over a proxy that also has one 192.x address and one 10.x address. The name of this proxy is added to /etc/hosts with the 10.x address. Additionally, the network settings for the 10.x adapter include the proxy as gateway. The 192.x adapter has no gateway. If I ping the proxy, it is correctly resolved over the 10.x address.

All my applications are set to "directly connect to the Internet".
Some apps (the "good" ones) use the 10.x address to connect to the proxy, while some others (e.g. Firefox, the "bad" ones) use the 192.x address. The latter fail to connect to the Internet because the proxy is configured to let traffic through the 10.x adapter only.

Any ideas why some apps try the 192.x-way? I don't see any reason they should do this, see network config above.

Thanks,
Hobbes

P.S.: system is RHEL 5.5

What is the output of the "route" command from the cli?

When an application makes a network connection, it usually binds to a socket with the INADDR_ANY constant (usually resolves to 0.0.0.0). The system then decides which interface to send traffic on.

A lot of things determine which interface the system will choose. When you use ping, the system knows which address you are trying reach and chooses the one with the shortest route. Another way the system can select an interface is by using the interface "metric", which you can thing of as a rating system.

I'm going to guess that the 192.168.x subnet exists for some internal usage that you don't want to have access outside of the devices directly on the subnet. However, you can play around with some settings and see what works.

To start with, try this link /0pointer.de/lennart/projects/ifmetric/ which gives you a way to assign different metrics to the interfaces. If Firefox is attempting to connect to 111.111.111.111, it has no way of knowing which interface would give the shortest route. By setting the metric on the 10.x interface to be preferred, it should pick that one. Any traffic going to the 192.168.x subnet would still use the other interface because interfaces in the same subnet should get preference.

DISCLAIMOR: With all the different distros and versions, you may have to play around a bit to see what works for you.

I have an ethernet connection which is the 192.168.10 subnet and a WiFi connection which is on the 192.168.1 subnet.
The 192.168.10 addresses get routed to thegateway 192.168.10.103 (router) and the 192.168.1 addresses get routed to 192.168.1.1 which is the wlan (WiFi).
# route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
0.0.0.0 192.168.10.103 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 br0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
192.168.10.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 br0
br0 is my ethernet bridge.I just noticed I haven't set the default Gateway for the wlan.sepulot:~ # route add -net 92.168.1.0/24 gw 192.168.1.1
sepulot:~ # route -n
Kernel IP routing table
Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
0.0.0.0 192.168.10.103 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 br0
92.168.1.0 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 UG 0 0 0 wlan0
127.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 wlan0
192.168.10.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 br0

Thanks for the responses.

@nplusplus: this is my routing table:

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface
192.168.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 seth1
169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 seth1
10.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 seth0
0.0.0.0 10.0.0.100 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 seth0

@rabinnh: ifmetric looks interesting. I will try that out. The 192.x is for connecting to the client from other clients via VNC. The 10.x is an internal virtual network.

@Siddly: 10.0.0.100 is the proxy. Since this is the gateway of the 10.x adapter, I don't understand how an application might choose 192.168.0.100 instead. If I don't set this gateway, I wouldn't have any internet access. I've also set the 10.0.0.100 in Firefox as proxy, but even then there came a pop-up window from the proxy asking for credentials and the pop-up shows the address 192.168.0.100!! This is very strange. Maybe the initial connection to proxy is correctly done with 10.x, but the proxy itself answers with 192.x?? That would also be strange because the client is added to the proxy's hosts file with the 10.x address.

ifmetric didn't help. :(

I found out another weird thing: When I use Firefox as root with the same settings - it works! :confused:

Possibly /etc/resolv.conf, here's mine for my 2 segments
nameserver 192.168.10.103
nameserver 192.168.1.1