[newbie] as of last posting, i got ip-masquerading to work... but...

[Ronald Rand]

I didn't realize the delay on these posts were over an hour. Thanks in advance to anyone who answers it in the next hour. But I did get IP-Masquerading to work. But I have more newbie questions.   First, is there a way to send an ifconfig command to eth0 before Linux tries to initialize it upon bootup? It keeps hanging for a few minutes and failing and then I have to poke it with an ifconfig command that changes some specs. It would be nice if I could automate this.   Also, according to the IP-Masquerading FAQ, there's a file called  /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall that I had to make for it to work. But after I made it, and upon rebooting, it didn't take effect. I had to type all the code at the command prompt line-by-line before my Masquerading worked. So my question is, what is this directory? Are all these rc files supposed to automatically run on every bootup? Why didn't mine run? Do I have to assign each one somewhere?   Much thanks in advance!