This one has me stumped. I know there are similar threads but none of the answers I found worked for me. After running my DSL gateway with Winbloat 98 for the last few years, I want to switch over to Linux with it. I tried Mandriva 2006 at first, but was unable to access any of the shared folders, and in trying to fix that I managed to TOTALLY isolate the server (no internet, no intranet, no printers). I finally gave that up and went back to my old standby Slackware 10.2 (runs 2 of my clients just fine!). I got the driver for my Alcatel USB installed and working just fine, but now the fun part: even though all the clients can access the shared folders just fine (with the exact same smb.conf file I tried to use in Mandriva), they cannot access the internet. I'm using the rc.firewall-iptables file suggested in the IP-Masquerading HOWTO off of tdlp.org, but I'm actually at a loss on this one. I want to dump Winbloat on this machine altogether because I have just added webserver to its list of duties and I've had problems with Apache hosing up and going to sleep on me. Any help is appreciated.

If you have setup masquerading and iptables nat and forwarding is operational then the only other factor is the way you have setup the gateway. The gateway for boxes attached to this box should be the ip address of the network card that they are connected to. eth0 and eth1 must be on different subnets. If you run a dhcp server then make sure they are picking up the lease correctly.