Is ipmasq worth it?
Background:
I got DSL and wanted to set up a debian box to act as a router/firewall
for a couple of workstations on my home LAN. At the time, I knew
nothing about iptables or firewalls, so I installed ipmasq and figured I
would read up on firewalls and iptables later.
More recent background:
I recently set up a web server on my home LAN, and wanted to give the
outside world access to it. So I read some firewall/iptables howtos,
and to my surprise, it all seems much simpler than I imagined. I
quickly added a .rul file in /etc/ipmasq/rules and my firewall box was
rerouting tcp port 80 traffic to the internal lan just fine.
My question:
Is ipmasq really worth using? It almost seems more difficult keeping
track of multiple .rul files, plus ipmasq has many .def files that seem
to set up rules also. From the looks of it, it seems like it may be
easier to just set it all up manually myself and have full control over
everything rather than having to learn to do things the ipmasq way.
Does anyone else have thoughts on this? Many of the example iptables
scripts have everything in one file, which would probably make
maintaining it much simpler. From what I read, the biggest advantage of
ipmasq is that it starts everything automatically for you and without
it, you would have to write something to load your rules. I really
don't see this as a problem, though, so does anyone have any
suggestions? Should I ditch ipmasq and do things manually or learn the
ipmasq way?
--
Jason Stechschulte
jpstech@unoh.edu
--
Think of prototypes as a funny markup language--the interpretation is
left up to the rendering engine.
-- Larry Wall in <199710221710.KAA24242@wall.org>
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