/etc/network/interfaces not strictly correct?

[Peter S Galbraith <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>]

I rebooted woody after an uptime of 48 days to find my network
setup incomplete:

$ ping www.debian.org
PING www.debian.org (198.186.203.20): 56 data bytes
ping: sendto: Network is unreachable
ping: wrote www.debian.org 64 chars, ret=-1

Here's my /etc/network/interfaces file:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static 
  address 142.130.48.235
  netmask 255.255.252.0

Anything wrong with that?

-

I couldn't ping past my gateway.
A look at `route` shows:

$ route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
localnet        *               255.255.252.0   U     0      0        0 eth0

So I manually added a default route:

$ sudo route add default gw 142.130.48.1
$ route
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface
localnet        *               255.255.252.0   U     0      0        0 eth0
default         142.130.48.1    0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 eth0

Now the web works, but strangely ping still fails:

$ ping www.debian.org
PING www.debian.org (198.186.203.20): 56 data bytes
[C-c]
--- www.debian.org ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Any hints appreciated.

Thanks,
-- 
Peter Galbraith, research scientist          <GalbraithP@dfo-mpo.gc.ca>
Maurice Lamontagne Institute, Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada
P.O. Box 1000, Mont-Joli Qc, G5H 3Z4 Canada. 418-775-0852 FAX: 775-0546
    6623'rd GNU/Linux user at the Counter - http://counter.li.org/