[Gllug] IP Masquerading / Proxy servers / default routes

[Paul Brazier]

I'm just battling at the moment with IP masquerading:

What is the essential difference between IP masquerading and
(transparent or otherwise) proxies?
Do they basically do the same thing, because surely the need for LANs to
access the internet via a gateway machine has always been around but IP
masquerading in Linux is a fairly new thing?
Is it that IP masquerading is in the kernel and proxies aren't?
Or is IP masquerading happening at a "lower level" i.e. individual IP
packets, whereas proxies are needed for each protocol on top of TCP/IP
e.g http, ftp, telnet etc?
e.g. at work I access the internet via a proxy server (WinNT) - with IP
masquerading I wouldn't need this?

I'm also unsure about setting default routes and gateways:

For my "internal" machine, is the gateway my "dial-up" machine or the
gateway at my ISP (Demon)?
For my dial up machine, is the gateway nothing at all or the gateway at
my ISP?
If I set it to itself, my pppd "dies unexpectedly" until I do "route del
default". Then "route -n" indicates the default route is Demon's
gateway.
Are there "two levels" of gateway e.g. my internal machines use my
dial-up machine as a gateway but my dial-up machine uses Demon as a
"second level" gateway?
With a simple home LAN do I need a default route at all or should I let
pppd set one for me?

--
Paul Brazier
Cosmos UK 


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