network routing malfunction

[Pierre Abbat]

I have a VPN; sometimes it doesn't work properly.

chausie is the Linux box, which runs the VPN; it has eth0 and ppp0. darner is 
the DragonFly box; it has em0. linksys is a router; chausie's eth0 and 
darner's em0 are connected to the LAN side. sco is behind NAT on the other 
end of the VPN.

I woke up and finished a drawing and had to copy it to sco. My telnet session 
to sco had broken during the night. (sco doesn't have ssh; I telnet over the 
VPN.) I checked the VPN and found it had dropped, so I restarted it. I tried 
telnetting and failed. I tried pinging and succeeded, but running tcpdump on 
chausie showed that packets were not going through chausie. I ran "route 
show" and "traceroute sco" on darner and then packets started going through 
chausie and I logged in to sco. How come?

Pierre
-- 
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.