Hi all. I've recently switched my firewall/NAT from Windows 2000 to Red Hat 7.3, and it was hell. I had used IPCHAINS in the past, but I believed that IPCHAINS had been removed from 2.4.x kernels in favour of IPTABLES. So I merrily started trying to set up a firewall using IPTABLES only to find that it wasn't being loaded by the kernel because IPCHAINS was loaded first.

I have two questions. Firstly, should I be using IPCHAINS? Is there any reason not to, I've got it all working (ish) now.

The real problem I'm having is with web access from the Windows boxes that are accessing the net via NAT. I can access the net OK, but some pages on slightly slower sites are received incomplete (under both IE and Mozilla). The browser just says "Done", but a View Source shows that a chunk of the page wasn't downloaded. Usually a couple of hits of Refresh fixes it, but one very important site, Windows Update, never loads properly. How can I fix this?

You have to use iptables with 2.4.x kernels if you intend to use your Linux box for IP Masquerading, if you want to load the protocol-specific modules (i.e. the IRC, Quake, FTP support). If you don't care about all these protocols you can still use ipchains. You just have to unload the iptables module(s) and load the ipchains module.

Dear All,
I have tried to configure the iptables without any rules but just performing the MASQUERADE of the NAT. My download speed of any machine in my local domain is only 2~3k. I have checked the collision and try to perform the http download on the redhat box itself. The speed could up to 100k!!! I am using two identical rtl8139 LAN cards. Anyone could help me?


Regards,
PC