>> Any ideas why this is happening? I dont have a firewall on the 10.54 >> address, > > presumably, the windows machine is connected to the 'eth0' network > that the centos machines are connected to? > > how exactly do you expect the packets to get from there to the other > network? the windows machine has been instructed to forward all > unknown packets to 10.54.7.1, which presumably is some other sort of > router... chances are, said 10.54.7.1 has no clue where 10.54.0.xxx is. > Ya- I see - your right the router is 10.54.7.1 The rest of the network switches are hubs off of that (all still 10.54.7.) this private network is truly private (independent to the 2 computers connected) in other words they are off the network, their traffic oesn't go through a switch. I didn't give this enough thought .... the fact is I dont need to connect to the 0 address directly from the windows machine. The 0 address is only for private network between the database servers... I was just curious that I couldn't ping them, I thought ping (and the port scanner) should magically find them (like dns) ... > solution 1) configure a linux computer to do 'ip forwarding', and give > the windows machine a route like... > > C> route add 10.54.0.0 mask 255.255.255.0 gw 10.54.7.2 > > or, solution 2) configure the router at 10.54.7.1 to have a route to > this other network. > > > if both networks are on the same hub/switch, then I can only ask... WHY? Thanks for the insight, Bob