Broadcast across subnets
OK, I know this is 'evil', 'dangerous' and scorned by all kernel developers, but I really, REALLY need to be able to forward broadcast packets from one subnet to another.
Basically, I have two machines sitting in my room on subnet 192.168.0.0. One of the two machines is a linux box that is also connected to the campus network as 155.245.116.151. Needless to say, the 192.168.* addresses are not visible to the rest of campus, and I have no control whatsoever over the campus network and so can't change that.
The machine that is connected to the campus network runs Linux and holds my home directory, some of my software, serves files to the rest of campus and runs games servers. The other machine is my main machine and runs Windows and Linux dual boot. All traffic into the server is forwarded to my main machine (except for a couple of ports for ssh, ftp etc) and all traffic from my main machine is masqueraded and forwarded to the campus network. This all works absolutely flawlessly.
The problem is that broadcast messages sent from my main machine correctly fail to reach the campus network, which effectively prevents SMB and most games (which are, as a rule, incredibly poorly designed and prevent you from entering IP addresses manually) from working. If only Linux would let you forward broadcast packets this would be no problem at all.
Unfortunately, it seems to have been decided that such functionality is 'absolutely useless' (clearly not, given my situation) and 'dangerous' (i am puzzled as to why). Cake to anyone who can find a software solution to this without saying 'VPN'.
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