what is the easiest way to bind nic cards? I have 1 public ip, 3 nic cards in my red hat 9 box, and a LAN i need to NAT throught the public ip. i am also doing some port forwarding using iptables. DO i need the additional nic card? i have prepared my switch with a VLAN so i may accomplish this. thank you in advance.

what do u mean by "bind" your NICS?

3 nics and a switch should be more than enough for a small network setup. What are you trying to do?

With the switch you only need 2 NIC cards, 1 for the external and 1 to connect to the switch.

for you nating rules you can use (and SHOULD use) iptables:

example:

iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -s $LAN -j SNAT --to $PUBLIC_IP

or if you have a dynamic public IP

iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -s $LAN -j MASQUERADE

(where $LAN=192.168.0.0/24 for example and $PUBLIC_IP is you public IP address)

a port forwarding example:

iptables -A PREROUTING -t nat -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to $WEBSERVER


that will forward all web requests (port 80) to the $WEBSERVER machine (where $WEBSERVER can be replaced with the ip of the webserver i.e. 192.168.1.200 or something like that).


for more help on iptables, you can either ask if u have specific questions or do search on the forums:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/search.php

I got that from your first reply to a different post. i really like your approach and appreciate your good advice. I just want to be certain that traffic is traveling INTO eth1(public ip) from the internet and out through eth0(private dhcp nat addresses), and vice-a-versa. How do I validate the cards with one another?