Hi all,

I have an RH 8 box acting as my gateway, DNS server, sendmail server, Samba server, etc.). One thing that I find annoying is that if I happen to reboot this machine, I lose internet access from all the other Windows machines until I run the following 2 commands:

# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

# echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

After that, internet access from all the other computers on the network runs fine. My question is this. How can I get these two things to startup when the computer is booted so I won't have to manually run the commands every time? Thanks all!

Chris

AFAIR one of the /etc/rc.d/init.d scripts is responsible for firewall setting (look for a script with a name like 'firewall' or something like this:)
next if you found it you see the script executes command 'iptables-restore <file_name'
this is the files name which need to be changed with the command 'iptables-save>file_name'
regarding the "echo..." put it anywhere in the booting scripts, for instance in the same 'firewall' script.

Short of that not working you can place commands in an rc.local file (usually located in /etc/rc.d but sometimes symlinked in /etc/rc.local). They will be executed before anyone logs in, during system startup.

Cool

Thanks guys,

I'll check that stuff out and let you know here. MasterC, good seeing you again!

Chris

What I did was I created a full router/firewall script and put it into my root dir and then edited the /etc/init.d/network script which is where the NICs are loaded on setup to lauch my script. However since you are running only two commands I would suggest just editing that file and putting the two lines before the stop command. This way as soon as the NICs are loaded so is the internet for the rest of your network.