SSH broke and network traffic / talking issue between hosts and server

Ok Time warner cable / voip modem feeding Cisco PIX 501 Wan port from PIX 501 LAN port to WAN port on Linksys wrt54GL wireless router.

so

-->Modem-->PIX 501-->WRT54GL-->Linux Server, wireless desktop, wireless laptop (2), Wireless MAC Pro, Wireless Apple TV, Wireless printer.

my wrt54gl is configured to hand out leases from 192.168.8.2 starting address to 192.168.8.12 ending address (10 leases total) the default gateway is 192.168.8.1

I have the linux box (Centos 5.2) plugged into the linksysy wrt54gl by wire

I was under the assumption that as long as anything on the linksys had an address of 192.168.8.X they could talk back and forth through the linksys without going out to the PIX.

I want my linux box to be statically assigned to 192.168.8.100

when i do this i cant ping any of the leased addresses, nor pull up google.com or ping it. however if i statically assign it to one the free lease addresses it works fine and can be pinged.

that is my first problem and i dont know how to fix it.

My second problem is i had sshd working fine but i changed the sshd_config to listenaddress at 192.168.8.0 it wasnt working so i changed that to 192.168.0.0 and did a service sshd restart and it keeps giving me failed on stop but ok on start but service sshd status returns sshd dead but subsystem locked.

when i had it at listenaddress 0.0.0.0 it was working fine.

what is going on here?