Ewan J. Fisher wrote: >Hi, > I am very new to Linux and I am having problems. I am running Red Hat Linux >on my network server. However I wish to be able to have the server online and >allow other pc's to access the internet through the server. I have _no_ idea >how do go about doing this and any help would be greatfully recieved. > >Ewan >[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Hi Ewan,
Linuxdoc.org is your friend. There are a number of guide to doing what you want to do, heres a description of what you probably want to accomplish. Masqurading, this allows (almost) complete internet access from other machines on your local network, This is the most common way to share an internet connection. If your using 2.4.x kernal (Fairly recent distros. such as SuSE 7.1+, Mandrake 8+) you will be using a command called iptables a lot which is responsible for setting up a firewall and masquerading. man iptables (Don't be scared :) will give you a good idea of how to use the command. Basically what you want to do is allow everything access to everything you do the following. before you do anything you want to read this. ipchains -f iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT basically this removes all existing rules then adds a default policy to the input, output chains to allow access from and to other machines, the third rule allows the kernel to masquerade and mangle packets as needed so they can be transmitted out of your local network. BE WARNED! This is a very insecure way of running things, Use a real firewall script. But it will work for now. http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Firewall-HOWTO.html is the firewall howto, it will also be useful to you. If your using 2.2.x kernel you will need to look at the ip masquerading howto. http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO.html You can also use a proxy server. Proxies take requests from your browser and get the data on the clients behalf (Some can be configured to store the data for you) This can be simpler to set up and more secure but it doesnt do everything everybody needs. For this you need to read documentation which will come with the proxy you decide to install, usually people use squid or apache which usually come with your distro, and depending on whether your distro is FHS complient your documentation for the process will be in /usr/share/doc or /usr/doc HTH David -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
