How to connect laptop and desktop w/NICs

[Mike Meyer]

In <200304131204.13035.taxman at acd.net>, taxman <taxman at acd.net> typed:
> On Sunday 13 April 2003 11:26 am, Wayne Pascoe wrote:
> > On Sun, Apr 13, 2003 at 01:13:55PM +0100, Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> > > So far, so good.  I can ping each machine from the other, and reset these
> > > settings on startup.
> > > However, the laptop (which I decided to make a client of the desktop, now
> > > that I have a modem for the desktop) cannot ping past the gateway.  I
> > > have the default router set to the desktop, but something else must be
> > > wrong.
> > > Do I need to have inetd or natd running explicitly for this to work?
> > Do you have
> > gateway_enable="YES"
> > in /etc/rc.conf ? If not you need to add this.
> from rc.conf(5) it doesn't seem that gateway_enable starts natd.  Then what is 
> the difference?
> I'm a networking moron and in a similiar situation as Jonathon, and I was 
> wondering which options to use.

gateway_enable sets net.inet.ip.forwarding to 1, so that the host will
forward packets from one interface to another. That's what a gateway
does.

nat is Numerical Address Translation. It's a function that a gateway
can do as well as forward packats, and makes it possible to hide
internal IP addresses and have multiple machines share an IP
address. Just having forwarding on won't do that.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.