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1. Introduction

This page contains a simple cookbook for setting up Red Hat 6.X as an internet gateway for a home network or small office network. The instructions are very simplified: no special cases will be discussed, and some assumptions will be made about which network addresses are to be used. The most important assumptions are:

If you do not meet any of these assumptions, then this document probably isn't for you.

There is nothing special that you have to do during the installation process. Simply choose an installation which makes sense for you and go for it. This document gives directions on installing everything to do with networking from scratch, to avoid making any assumptions about what was installed or configured during installation. To ensure that things work and there is no confusion about what information goes where, all the configuration will be done by directly editing the system configuration files rather than using the GUI configuration tools provided with Red Hat. On the one hand, this might be a little harder than it has to be; on the other hand, your knowledge will be a good deal more transferable to different distributions and situations (like, what if X doesn't work, or you are setting up a headless server).

1.1 Versions

The latest version of this document should always be available at http://www.coastnet.com/~pramsey/linux/homenet.html for the HTML version and http://www.coastnet.com/~pramsey/linux/homenet.sgml for the SGML version.

1.2 Copyright

Copyright © 2000, Paul Ramsey.

This manual may be reproduced in whole or in part, without fee, subject to the following restrictions:

Exceptions to these rules may be granted for academic purposes: Write to the author and ask. These restrictions are here to protect us as authors, not to restrict you as learners and educators.


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