Hi All,

My box at home, owing to the appearance of several new boxes in the house, is now to become a gateway. Its got Mandrake 8.0 on, which I've been happy with for quite a while. But reading up on IP masquerading and what knot has served me with lots of information on re-compiling the kernel with CONFIG_IP_whatever in and various other things. And how to do it in RedHat (which I thought was very similar to Mandrake).

The thing is having compiled it, guessing most of the bits I didn't know, I can't actually find the image. Does mandrake call it something funny. Its not in /usr/src/linux-x.../arch/i386/boot or anywhere else (or so it seems)

anyway. The long and the short of this post is:

Should I stick with Mandrake for IP masquerading, in which case any help gratefully received.

Or. Shall I go back to RedHat 6.2 (latest ver I have)?

Many thanks.

JC

I use Mandrake 8.0 with iptables to perform masquerading and make my Linux box the gateway for other boxes on the LAN. All I did was install iptables (rpm is on the CD's or you can get the source and recompile the kernel as well) and then did:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

where eth0 is my external interface.

Once I knew it was working I placed them in /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall so they are done on startup. (you can make them excute on startup in otherways as well)

Following that you could also use iptables to act a firewall packetfilter to provide some security. Check the Security fourm for some tips. I basically studied the ipchains and iptables scripts posted there and adapted them for my needs