I am running several RH8 firewalls using iptables with NAT enabled. What I am finding is that while iptables starts up just fine at boot, the nat part doesn't work until I do a restart.

I am running DHCP to the internal LAN, and was wondering if the ordering of these 2 (iptables starts up first) could be a problem?

According to /var/log/boot.log, iptables starts up without error. An iptables -L shows that the tables are all loaded and the rules all seem to be there. I have ip_forward turned on via /etc/sysctl.conf, and the script loads all the iptables modules before doing anything else practically.

Here are the NAT statements
$IPTABLES -A PREROUTING -t nat -i $EXTIF -p tcp -d $EXTPRINTIP --dport 9100 -j DNAT --to-destination $INTPRINTIP

#Source NAT from Internal Net to External Net
$IPTABLES -A POSTROUTING -t nat -o $EXTIF -j SNAT --to-source $EXTIP

thanks.

Do yourself a big favor
http://firestarter.sourceforge.net/

after writting the command down save it by :

service iptables save

have you modprob-ed? have you wroten '1' in /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward?

states that I use sysctl.conf to set ip_forward to 1 and the script loads all the modules.

I would rather get this one nutted out if possible than move onto another application with the question unanswered.

But thanks for the replies anyhow.