March 23, 2001, 10:30 AM —
Q: Maybe you can help. I want to set up my Mandrake 7.2 machine as a router and proxy with a 3Com 56K Message Modem (serial) as dialup-on-demand and a 3Com 3c509 Ethernet card.
A: Setting up a router and proxy is a huge subject, but I will give you the basics and some pointers to get you started. There are a couple of technical terms that you have to be familiar with. The first is "IP-Masquerading." If you refer to the IP-Masq-HOWTO located at the Linux Documentation Project Website (see Resources), it will tell you in Section 1.1: Introduction to IP Masquerading (or IP Masq for short) that:
IP Masq is a form of Network Address Translation, or NAT, that allows internally connected computers that do not have one or more registered Internet IP addresses to have the ability to communicate to the Internet via your Linux box's single Internet IP address. It is possible to connect your internal machines to the Linux host with LAN technologies like Ethernet, Token Ring, FDDI, as well as other kinds of connections such as dialup PPP or SLIP links. This document uses Ethernet for the primary example since it is the most common scenario.
