[geeks] Re: [SunRescue] Help!

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:

> Well what the Linux dudes call "IP Masquerading" is really generally
> called Network Address Translation, or NAT by the rest of the world.

I recently found a reason to not call what linux does NAT.  NAT implies
that you can translate both ways.  Linux (from the documentation I've
found) only seems to do the private network -> 1 outside address thing.
Supposedly there are some kernel patches to allow more flexible
mappings, but it doesn't do it out of the box.  Now, I don't know if
the iptables stuff in 2.4 has fixed that, but it is true for 2.2.x

I was fairly disappointed by that, as I like Linux (although I liked
OpenBSD better for firewalls before this discovery).

--Kurt