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2. Where is the official Web Site and List?

There are three official sites:

• Thanks to Filewatcher.
• Thanks to The Samba Team and SGI.
• Thanks to Harald Welte.

You can reach all of them using round-robin DNS via http://www.netfilter.org/ and http://www.iptables.org/

For the official netfilter mailing list, see netfilter List.

2.1 What is Network Address Translation?

Normally, packets on a network travel from their source (such as your home computer) to their destination (such as www.gnumonks.org) through many different links: about 19 from where I am in Australia. None of these links really alter your packet: they just send it onward.

If one of these links were to do NAT, then they would alter the source or destinations of the packet as it passes through. As you can imagine, this is not how the system was designed to work, and hence NAT is always something of a crock. Usually the link doing NAT will remember how it mangled a packet, and when a reply packet passes through the other way, it will do the reverse mangling on that reply packet, so everything works.

2.2 Why Would I Want To Do NAT?

In a perfect world, you wouldn't. Meanwhile, the main reasons are:

Modem Connections To The Internet

Most ISPs give you a single IP address when you dial up to them. You can send out packets with any source address you want, but only replies to packets with this source IP address will return to you. If you want to use multiple different machines (such as a home network) to connect to the Internet through this one link, you'll need NAT.

This is by far the most common use of NAT today, commonly known as `masquerading' in the Linux world. I call this SNAT, because you change the source address of the first packet.

Multiple Servers

Sometimes you want to change where packets heading into your network will go. Frequently this is because (as above), you have only one IP address, but you want people to be able to get into the boxes behind the one with the `real' IP address. If you rewrite the destination of incoming packets, you can manage this. This type of NAT was called port-forwarding under previous versions of Linux.

A common variation of this is load-sharing, where the mapping ranges over a set of machines, fanning packets out to them. If you're doing this on a serious scale, you may want to look at

Linux Virtual Server.

Transparent Proxying

Sometimes you want to pretend that each packet which passes through your Linux box is destined for a program on the Linux box itself. This is used to make transparent proxies: a proxy is a program which stands between your network and the outside world, shuffling communication between the two. The transparent part is because your network won't even know it's talking to a proxy, unless of course, the proxy doesn't work.

Squid can be configured to work this way, and it is called redirection or transparent proxying under previous Linux versions.