*BSD News Article 76223


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From: iverson@cisco.com (Tim Iverson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: IP Masqerading?
Date: 15 Aug 1996 23:53:20 GMT
Organization: cisco
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <4v0d9g$si5@cronkite.cisco.com>
References: <jfortes-1307951117380001@10.0.2.15> <4un1qu$kp9@jupiter.dnai.com> <Pine.BSI.3.94.960814191714.10347A-100000@spyder.inna.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: rottweiler.cisco.com

In article <Pine.BSI.3.94.960814191714.10347A-100000@spyder.inna.net>,
Jamie Bowden  <jamie@inna.net> wrote:
|On 12 Aug 1996, Karl Wiebe wrote:
|> jfortes@jaguar.saturn.net (Jonathan A. Fortes) wrote:
|> >Has IP masquerading ever been impllemented in FreeBSD?
|> Darren Reed's IPFilter and you can have NAT ( == IP Masquerading ).
|> http://cheops.anu.edu.au/~avalon/ip-filter.html
|
|Talk about doing it the hard way.  Just man ifconfig.  It's built in.
|
|Jamie Bowden
|Network Administrator, TBI Ltd.

No, it's not.  You can do aliasing via ifconfig, but not NAT.  Network
Address Translation allows you to map an entire *network* to a different
set of IP addresses; eg. suppose your internal LAN uses 10.10.10.0, using
NAT, you can map these internal addresses from 10.10.10.0/24 to, say,
204.16.18.0/24, which has been granted to you by your ISP.  Folks from
outside your network would see your systems as being on 204.16.18.0/24, not
10.10.10.0/24.

Of even more interest to many folks is the ability to map many internal IPs
to just one external IP.  I do this, and it saves me several hundred
dollars a month compared to renting a block of IPs from my ISP.

The reason NAT often spawns religious diatribes is that blind NAT doesn't
work very well -- it breaks protocols that embed IP addresses inside the
payload.  To do a really good job, your NAT code must understand which
protocols do this and handle them appropriately.

Some overly prissy engineers balk at lifting a packet's skirts and playing
with what you find underneath, "packets should remain pristine", they say.
Ha!  All ya gotta do is ask nice and apply a little finesse and the packet
will be yours.  And, what you do with your packet in private is absolutely
none of their concern ... ;-)


- Tim Iverson
  iverson@lionheart.com