[plug] Dumb questino on networking

[The Thought Assassin]

On Tue, 7 Jul 1998, John Darrington wrote:
> I have the opportunuty to replace a NT box with a linux machine, if I
> can gt it working as a gateway, QUICKLY.
> I sugessted a talk on this some time ago.  Somebody ( I cant remember 
> who) , said that it was so trivial that it was unneccesary.
> As it is so trivial, I know that no-one will mind answering this.

As the person who gave that talk, I'll just assume I made it sound so
trivial you missed it :)

I might just make a couple of additions to the good advice you have
already received.
Firstly, when Masquerading, or when doing any kind of forwarding for
non-teardrop-proof boxen, one should enable IP_ALWAYS_DEFRAGMENT.
Secondly, there are a few more protocol-specific modules available, look
at /lib/modules/<version>/ipv4/ip_masq_*.o - quake and irc come to mind.
Thirdly, the other recommendation of using a proxy server would
compliment the IP masquerading well. My preference is the 'squid' proxy
server which should work out-of-the-box on a debian or a redhat distro.
Half of the people on this list use it, so you won't be short of technical
support. Whether you'll be short of RAM is something you can check the
list archives for :)

-Greg