I'm using a crossover cable to test Mandrake 9.0 as a packet forwarding host, connected to a cable modem. Eventually I plan to run more computers through it, but I can't seem to solve a problem I'm having with forwarding.
It seems that Mandrake starts to drop packets from eth0 to eth1, and everything seems to be set up correctly. Everything works fine at boot. I know it's a problem with my setup but I'm not sure where to start. All I know is if I do 'echo 1 > /proc/sys/ipv4/ip_forward' (or whatever it is) it restarts the forwarding. At least once every 24 hours it starts dropping packets and won't restart until I manually restart it. I am using dhcpd to serve the ip address to the Windows XP Client. Other than using chron to automatically issue the echo command every hour or so (that wouldn't hurt anything would it?), is there something I can do to track this down and solve it? I've looked in /var/log/kernel and there are no related errors at about the time my packet forwarding went down the last time. Snort was running at the time, but that shouldn't cause any problems, and I think the problem has occurred without it running. I ran Bastille, which set up the bastille firewall (is it called prelude?). I noticed that it isn't supported yet (or at least it wasn't) in Mandrake 9.0 but I found a website that has an easy fix so it will at least run the main program correctly. Do you think Bastille would cause this kind of instability? Do you think getting the newest kernel from the cooker would fix it and not break too many things? How many dependency issues will I have with a newer kernel?
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
