I am creating a gateway with a Red Hat EL 5 box. I have gone in and changed the value from 0 to 1 in the sysctl.conf file and then restarted the machine. When the box restarted it didn't seem to work so I did a "/sbin/service network restart" and it goes through restarting the interfaces however it then goes on to say "disabling ipv4 fowarding = 0". I have checked the file afterwards and it still says 1 but everytime I restart the network devices it disables the forwarding.
Any ideas?

Yes the ipv4 forwarding seems to be explicitly disabled during the "stop" section of the network service script /etc/rc.d/init.d/network. During the "start" section there are calls to sysctl which will re-enable forwarding if it's set in sysctl.conf but there is no corresponding alert message printed.

So it would seem that the message is safe to ignore, and your forwarding will be re-enabled correctly during a restart. If you're concerned about it you could always hack the network script to check that forwarding has been re-enabled and print a message accordingly:

I'll have to take a look at the script then since it does not seem to work at all. Thanks for your help.