Ok, well this is my second post because my first one has already been moved to the second page. Basically I've got a problem with IPTABLES and NATing my DCC traffic from the internal network to the internet. My firewall works just fine and it routes everything else, but it doesn't route DCC traffic and I can't figure out what to do.

I've read up about how IRC DCC routing is supported by IPTABLES in a file called ip_nat_irc.o. I am loading this module when I load my firewall rulesets and it still doesn't work.

I've forwarded EVERY port to one of my internal computers to check and see if it was port forwarding problem, but nothing happened. When I try to do a DCC CHAT with one client on my internal network to another client on my internal network, the client requesting the CHAT gives me "Unable to Connect" and the client sending the CHAT just sits with a "Waiting for Acknoledgement" message until it times out.

I'm trying to read as much as I can, but it seems that these HOWTO's provide little to no documentation on this ip_nat_irc.o module.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

forward the port you use to send with to the host you send from.

Franksun, thank you for your reply as I've really had no replies in the last 2 days.

In response to the suggestion, I would like to point out that I did forward these ports. Now I said EVERY, but I really only forwarded 1024-65535. I will admit that I know very little about IPTABLES because it's quite confusing as to where to packets are going, and which ones should be let in, and what table will handle which packet.

To be perfectly honest I don't know if I'm doing it right because I've put the port fowarding in (according to several online documents) and taken it out and I've seen no change in my BitTorrent dl/ul speeds nor have I seen any change in my P2P programs. I suspect that I've already done everything I need to in a different chain and just put an unneeded chain in the mix for my BT and P2P clients. I don't know exactly how to port forward because several online documents give different variations of how to do this. However, from what I gathered from reading them all, I basically need to have a rule in FORWARD table and a rule in PREROUTING.

I do however think that it's not the port forwarding that's the issue here. I think it's a problem with handling IRC's DCC protocol. If anyone has a similar situation here but your box does allow DCC traffic through, could you please paste an example ruleset to handle DCC traffic here for me to look at?

Thanks for you help.

zr0

P.S. I used the firewall work around with my dccserver and the client requesting just sits and waits while the host does absolutely nothing.