I am at my wits end. I know this should be freakin simple. I have literally put in about 30 hours of time and I have not gotten anyway. Sorry for my frustration.

All I am trying to do is get a home gateway going. External nic is DSL modem. Internal nic is cross over to my laptop. 192.168.1.0

All I want to do is have my laptop access the internet. I have tried all kinds of things including masquerading and I am sure I have done nothing right.

Can't I just test a few simple things and to make sure I am moving from the laptop to the internet? From there I can build. I just can't get anything to freaking work.

Running RH 7.3 with 1.2.5 iptables and a 2.4 kernel

I have tried the HOWTO's from tldp.org, netfilter-samba.or and a few others. each time I tried, I totally reloaded 7.3 to make sure nothing was left.

Can someone just offer up a few suggestions?

Don't know much of all these. But I think 192.168.1.0 is a network address. Try making your laptop address 192.168.1.1 or something similar
--Sarin

Try http://freshmeat.net/projects/fw/

I hope you mean 192.168.0.1.

Hi Joe,

Let's get this stuff to work =]

The answers to the following questions should get us started.
- Can you ping the internet from the gateway?
- Can you ping the laptop from the gateway?
- Can you ping both addresses of the gateway from the gateway?
- What is the output of ifconfig on the gateway?
- What is the output of netstat -ar on the gateway?

Griffon26,

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it. I actually did end up getting it to work. I thought I replied to my own message indicating I had success, but I guess I didn't get it posted.

The problem I had was two things. Red Hat 7.3 during the installation asks to establish a firewall. I originally said yes, "setup medium rules". This resulted in Red Hat writing some ipchain rules for me. When ipchain is running, iptables has a hard time. I reinstalled without any automatically configured firewall rules. ipchains is effectively turned off as a module.

The other problem I had is rather embarrassing. The dhcp server was sending a gateway address of 192.168.1.254 (at my request). The NIC card had an address of 192.168.1.1 (also my request). So, when my client machine was handed a lease, it had the .254 address as a gateway and couldn't find the server. I could ping the .1 address but not the .254. Once I figured that out along with the iptables issue, everything worked!!!

Being a newbie, it is hard to know what is what. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN THOUGH for me, the hard way!

I ended up using www.tldp.org's HOWTO's and the one summurazing "routing" under networking is very helpful.

I now need to get remote access going. I can ssh into my server remotely, but I am having a tough time trying to find a program that will run Xcommands from my windows XP client machine. Do you have a recommendation?

If you mean using X as if you were at the linux box, there are several options.

You can use X-Win32 (http://www.starnet.com/) or Exceed (http://www.hummingbird.com/) to connect to the X server from your Windows PC.

Or you could use something like for example VNC (http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/) which copies the screen pixel by pixel (of course only those parts that changed since last copy).

The advantage of the first two are obvious: windows are drawn locally so you only need a little bit of bandwidth. The advantage of VNC is that if your connection gets severed, the applications won't lose their windows and keep on running.

If this is not what you meant, then you'll have to help me =]

Thanks, that was exactly what I was looking for. I tried a few programs I found but they weren't very good. I will check these out. Thanks!