Re: dnsmasq-base does work for connection sharing

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-03-11 at 21:51 +0900, Jacobs Shannon wrote:
> > Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:51:11 -0400
> > From: Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>
> > 
> > On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 09:30 +0900, Jacobs Shannon wrote:
> > > > Not sure what I did differently this last time, but
> > > > dnsmasq-base (alone) is working properly for the 
> > > > connection sharing. I've noticed a few minor behavioral 
> > > > differences, but I think that's probably just
> > > > some differences in the security settings.
> > > > 
> > > > The other problems I mentioned are minor, and I can just
> > > > live with them for now. I'll work with this 
> > > > configuration for a few weeks and see how things go. 
> > > > 
> > > > Thanks again for your encouragement.
> > > 
> > > And sometimes it doesn't... Presumably whatever I saw last
> > > night was whatever was going on the first time when it 
> > > didn't seem to be working. I don't know what state it is 
> > > in, but various lesser solutions such as tweaking the 
> > > configuration settings (in various orders) and restarting
> > > the network don't fix it. Nothing short of a
> > > full reboot seems to do the trick.
> > > 
> > > Whatever state it is in, the DHCP part seems to be working,
> > > and the gateway computer is connected normally, but none of
> > > the guest computers can reach the external network, though 
> > > they can ping the gateway machine. I now realize that I 
> > > didn't do quite enough testing to pin it to the DNS, but 
> > > I'll check with an external IP address the
> > > next time I see it...
> > 
> > So that sounds more like iptables rules than anything to do
> > with dnsmasq.  dnsmasq will only provide DHCP and DNS, so 
> > you should still be able to ping external addresses as long
> > as dnsmasq is returning the correct gateway to machines 
> > that perform DHCP requests. What's the
> > routing table on a machine you're sharing to?
> 
> Well, it hasn't got into the strange state lately, but I'll keep
> working with it and see if I can detect any patterns. 
> 
> Right now I'm mostly impressed with it, but I'm thinking about
> experimenting with the wireless side of it for ad hoc wireless
> networking to two of my machines instead of going through the hub.

If *anything* else is touching iptables rules on your machine, it could
step on the NM's rules unless that program is careful to only undo what
it added in the first place.

Dan