here's the deal. i have a win2k router which has been running fairly well since i set it up maybe half a year ago. the main problem is gui overhead, and i have to run it on a p2 - 333 to get good speeds with little lag. this is obviously ridiculous.
my solution. i want to set up a linux router. a buddy of mine recommended debian because once setup, is very easy to maintain, especially with things like apt-get (which i have used and am liking very much) so i picked up the 6 disks (rescue, root img, 4 x driver disks). installed base system - (installed 2 nics. get one connected to net and got base system from ftp site) therefore, this should mean latest kernel and utils. using tasksel i choose basic unix server, since this gives me things like sshd, less, locate and so on. by the descriptions, i should not need any other grouped packages. (no apache required, although i later put this on and installed webmin to see if i could do stuff there, but i will explain that later). i did not run dselect since last time i did that, i spent days going through the huge list of packages, and got nothing more in terms of actual functionality. i apt-get dhcpd, set that up with ranges and hosts. good to go, i have a machine behind with an appropriately assigned IP. it can't get on the net. i go over to iptables. i don't seem to be getting any response. so i try to simple list: (while user makes no difference, i am logged in as root) ---> p166deb:/# iptables -L modprobe: Can't locate module ip_tables iptables v1.2.6a: can't initialize iptables table `filter': iptables who? (do you need to insmod?) Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded. <--- so ip_tables for whatever reason can't be found. i read in forums that if ipchains is loaded, it can conflict. ---> p166deb:/# rmmod ipchains rmmod: module ipchains is not loaded <--- not loaded. maybe iptables is not installed? ---> p166deb:/# apt-get install iptables Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done Sorry, iptables is already the newest version. 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. <--- so iptables is installed and in the latest version according to apt-get sources (i have noticed that iptables is at 1.2.7a, but 1.2.6a should still work at least!!) so do i have an ip_tables file that for some reason is not being found? ---> p166deb:/# locate ip_tables /usr/include/linux/netfilter_ipv4/ip_tables.h <--- there's a file. unfortunately, i do not know what to do with this file as i have no clue where it should be. also, i have no clue what is inside the file. when i look, the closest thing it resembles to me is vhdl, and i know that has nothing to do with it :) i then tried to see if webmin could help me, so i installed apache and webmin, and started loading modules. webmin-dhcpd, webmin-sshd and they show up fine. but i cannot find a iptables module for webmin. (i was hoping for a gui interface which might have a different way of presenting things) webmin-iptables and webmin-ip_tables do not exist. there are no ip_tables to install through apt-get, so i have no clue why this file is not there (or loaded). one would think that if iptables was installed, it would have supporting files installed and loaded. i have also looked around on forums all over the net and have tried many things, of which none of them have done anything to fix the problem of ip_tables not being found as a module. any help appreciated. if this doesn't work, i'll probably move to redhat, for i've had other friends setup routers easily with redhat, but i'd rather try and get debian running. -doug
