I just successfully got ip masquerading set up on my home network (two computers, one debian, one win98... debian box does the masquerading, of course).
As a first pass at configuring this thing (I don't plan on leaving it like this, but I'm at the stage where I just want *something* that works) I set it up using: echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward ipchains -P forward MASQ After setting up the gateway correctly on the win98 box, this gave some sort of access through the linux box to the outside world. However, the performance was abysmal - far worse than doing the same things directly on the linux box. I did set "optimize as router not host" during my kernel compile (does this apply to masquerading? how heavy a penalty does this put on regular host usage... and for how much gain?). I also enabled ICMP masquerading. The linux box is a pentium 90 - slow but not *that* slow - with 72Mb RAM. The connection between the two machines is BNC ethernet and doesn't seem to be the bottleneck - transfers directly between the two machines go very fast. Is this horrible performance just something to be expected when using masquerading? Are there any possible ways to speed it up? (could it be caused by using gcc rather than gcc272 to compile the kernel? I thought that would cause crashes, not slowdowns) Any tips on diagnosing the problems? Thanks in advance for any help, Stuart.
