On Sat April 12 2008, John Cornelius wrote:
I gather that it's simply a case of you moving from direct connection to
the Internet to a connection that's behind your Cisco router. I further
presume that the (nominal) 70.x.x.120 address belongs to the Cisco. In
that case you probably don't want to do what you propose.
Thanks for your thoughts, and yes, your surmising is correct
Your box should be set up on the internal LAN subnet in the normal way.
All of the interesting configuration should be done on the Cisco router
by setting up source and destination NAT so that internet traffic on
specific ports addressed to the Cisco are routed to your box and
responses are automatically routed back through the Cisco to their
destination.
I viscerally believe you're correct, here - else why is this the way
this is universally done, but I sure could use some better technically
grounded expertise in the whys and wherefores
Trying to deal with this issue from inside the LAN rather than in the
router will most likely lead to frustration since whatever you do will
be fragile and probably break often if it works at all.
This is where I need better argumentation...if you can help, it would
be appreciated. Specific examples of why it's a bad idea, security
problems that could occur, other issues...unfortunately, this
configuration has been handed to me, it's not my idea, so I need to
understand what's wrong with it and be able to offer sound arguments
for the more conventional approach, if there's is a really sound
technical reason for not doing it this way.
I'm also dealing with the fact that another Linux box, a mail server,
has been moved on to this new FIOS lan and configured using the hack
that I cited in my original post, and is working quite nicely -
unfortunately, I don't clearly understand how to implement that hack
on Fedora, but, I'm getting the "if Jack could do this with his Debian
box, why can't you with your Fedora?"....
