Hello all,

Forgive me if this has been answered before. I have looked through the forums and google and have found similar posts, but nothing quite as detailed as what I'm trying to do.

I have a firewall running OpenSuse 11.3, with 6 ethernet interfaces (3 external/dhcp, 1 DMZ and 2 internal). I am trying to configure the 3 external interfaces to different dns names, using eth0 as the default connection, but being able to send packets on demand out eth1 and eth2.

I've build a few different iterations of linux firewalls, and have a basic understanding of how iptables work, but I am totally failing when it comes to being able to route packets out of the correct nic when needed. I've been testing with curl --interface ethX whichever nic is set to primary works every time, all of the others timeout, clearly routing issue.

I have tried adding a default route using ip route add default dev ethX metric x, but that doesn't seem to work. Can anyone help point me in the right direction?

Thank you.

Hey b1r2s,
When you say you are looking to assign the 3 external interfaces separate DNS names, how did you plan going about that? please be specific about what functionality you are attempting to gain. The same goes for sending data out a specific interface. That is certainly doable, but to what end? Our solutions may vary based on what exactly you are attempting to do, so lets get some details =)

Look into the iproute2 suite of utilities, should be installed by default. iproute2 does advanced routing, you wil lthen also want to look up redundant routers HO-TO

Thanks for your replies. I was able to figure out how to overcome my issue using iproute2 and setting up tables for each nic. So for now, I think I'm all set.