Re: [SLUG] worth of firewall-in-a-box hubs?

From: Paul Braman (aeon@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Sun Mar 31 2002 - 15:25:47 EST


On Sun, 31 Mar 2002, Paul M Foster wrote:

> Can't help you here. I use /etc/hosts for names, since there are only
> three machines turned on on the LAN. I only dhcpcd for getting my IP
> from Verizon.

I guess for 99% of the time this will work just fine. Even though the
machines on the LAN are getting IPs via DHCP they probably don't change
that often, so /etc/hosts should be *mostly* accurate.

A lookup from machine A may first go to /etc/hosts to see if it's in there
and, if not, go to the nameservers listed in /etc/resolv.conf (which is
populated via DHCP) which are the ISP nameservers. (This is the way I
imagine it works.)

> Of course, that begs a different question. Since, even with ipchains,
> packets come to the internet IP, how does the router know which LAN
> machine to route the packet to? I assume that the MAC address of the NIC
> is involved or something. Bottom line is that I assume that there is
> something in the answer packets that gives a clue (besides the
> non-routable IP of the LAN machine) to where a packet gets routed. If
> that's the case, then the question of "how long" the firewall waits is
> moot.

I'm guessing the following series of steps happen:

    o LAN machine sends a packet to internet machine.
    o The packet gets routed through firewall machine which
       remembers that it came from LAN machine.
    o Internet machine replies with a packet that arrives at
       firewall machine.
    o Firewall machine remembers that a packet was sent from
       LAN machine to internet machine and sends the reply to
       the correct LAN machine.

I guess the firewall/router would check to see if LAN machine accepted the
packet (which brings up the case of UDP) and, if it rejected the packet,
the firewall/router would turn off "accepting" further packets from the
internet machine.

Regardless, people more knowledgable than I figured out how to do all this
stuff, I'm just curious as heck as to how it really works. [shrugs]

Paul Braman
aeon@tampabay.rr.com



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