[Dnsmasq-discuss] Need help accessing my modem through my router

[jack seth]

Ok, I have a linksys router running dd-wrt firmware which is running dnsmasq.  My lan is on the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet.  I would like to be able to access my dsl modem through the router by its ip address and its hostname.  Of course the modem is connected to the WAN side of the router, so I added a ip address in the same subnet as the modems address (which is 192.168.2.254) to my router's wan port (which is vlan2) with this command

ifconfig vlan2 192.168.2.222 netmask 255.255.255.0

I also added this iptables rule to get traffic back

iptables -I POSTROUTING -t nat -o vlan2 -d 192.168.2.0/24 -j MASQUERADE

Here is the strange stuff that is happening.  If I try to access the modem by ip address (192.168.2.254) it seems the modem redirects the browser to 'launchmodem.com' (which is one of the ways you can reach the modem by name) before the homepage will appear.  Well this fails.  I figured modifying my 'hosts' file on my notebook (running Vista Ultimate) would solve the problem and it did.  So I thought instead of modifying my hosts file in Vista I would modify the hosts file on the router then any computer on the lan would be able to reach the modem.  I did that but it seems that Vista isn't using the host info from the router.  So I tried adding these commands to dnsmasq

address=/launchmodem/192.168.2.254
address=/launchmodem.com/192.168.2.254
address=/www.launchmodem.com/192.168.2.254

When I do this I can ping the modem FROM THE ROUTER all three ways i.e 'launchmodem', 'launchmodem.com', and 'www.launchmodem.com'  I can also ping the modem from the router all three ways with these added to the router's hosts file.  However, from my notebook I can only ping 'launchmodem.com', and 'www.launchmodem.com' but NOT 'launchmodem' (host not found).  Another oddity, I can only reach the modem in my browser with 'launchmodem.com' not with 'www.launchmodem.com' even though I can ping 'www.launchmodem.com'.

Can anyone advise me on what is going on here and how to troubleshoot/fix?

Thanks!

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