Hi, I have an old box which I want to use to route a dial-up 56k internet connection to an internal (192.168.x.x) network, of about 3 or 4 PCs. I am currently running Windows 2k AS on the server box, and Kerio WinRoute as the routing program. The system is a bit underpowered and the system crashes after a few hours of uptime (ie you cannot use the routing facilities, or connect to the FTP server. However you can still ping it... :/ ). Apart from these problems it works OK. I would like to try using Linux as a similar setup. I understand that I would have to use IP Forwarding etc, but I am unsure exactly what to do. Can anyone suggest what I should do and what distro I should use.. Thanks, David

You should be able to use just about any distro as they all seem to support IP tables (or the older IP chains). You want to look at IP Masquerading, pop onto ww.tldp.org and read the HOWTO on it. Alternatively you could use a smaller floppy based distro (like FreeSCO) which is a proxy, gateway etc all rolled into one, and you just need to boot the floppy, no need to install it!

Another good OS for routers is OpenBSD. They have so much information in their "FAQs," most are more like step-by-step guides (including networking, firewall, NAT, port forwarding, etc.). Also, I like the firewall rule syntax more than iptables in Linux. It just seems more intuitive. I don't know about modem support in OpenBSD, but it's great as a router, and it's one of the most secure OSs available.

Well, I do this with Redhat 8, but should work with most 2.4 kernel-based distros. All I had to do was get my dial-up connection working (as well as my networking), then, at a command prompt enter these 3 lines: # modprobe iptable_nat # iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j MASQUERADE # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward (the 2nd line may be wrapping) I have done this (IP masquerading, or NAT) on the 2.0 and 2.2 kernels, as well, if you'd like to use an older distro, but with your specs (PII 266 and 64 Meg of RAM), you should be able to roll on Redhat 8 (or whatever, although for a server installation such as yours, I wouldn't recommend Mandrake) and use this as a router. With the 3 lines noted above, I put them in a file (made it executable...chmod +x filename), and then inserted that filename (ie /bin/ipmasq) at the bottom of the /etc/rc.d/rc.local file so I don't have to enter these lines everytime (the IP masquerading is then set up upon boot). If you decide to use something other than Redhat, the placement of the 3-line file in /etc/rc.d/rc.local may not be directly portable and may need to be placed elsewhere. Good luck.