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Now for a long long time I have been perplexed by why my firewall never works on my linux boxes on initial boot. 

When you run iptables –list is shows all the rules but never works until you run it again under the root account.  Now I finally got around to finding out why and its because the ipv4 forwarding is being reset somewhere down the boot chain.  Yep I found it, what you need to do is edit /etc/sysctl.conf and change the net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 as this is set to 0 by default and switches off all forwarding used in any firewall script.

Now I did have the forwarding set in the script but the sysctl appears to run after all the startup processes.

Hope this helps as it certainly has been puzzling me for sometime.

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Recently I built the linux-atm software, which is an atm utility which allows me to use my pci ADSL card on linux.

The latest release is version 2.4.1 which I pulled down off of sourceforge, and I then tried to compile it.  This is what I fell fowl of..

1. The source has four compilation errors which are at lines with default: in the case statements these need ; after them, you can either edit the four bits of source code yourself or get a patched version of the code from here.

2. Then I kept getting the error ’storage size of req is not know’ and ‘invalid application of sizeof to incomplete type atmif_soic’ which I realised that I had the paths to my kernel source incorrect.  Now I put in a symbolic link to the source so /usr/src/linux pointed to /usr/src/redhat/BUILD/kernel-2.6.9/linux-2.6.9/include [ which is where the source really was ].  So to correct this error I typed this before running the configure of linux-atm.

CFLAGS=-I/usr/src/linux ./configure

and that got me over that problem.

3.  Then I got the error ‘config.h:6:2 error including kernel header in userspace use the glibc headers instead’ in atmdev.h to get around this I changed the line config.h to autoconf.h

Then it all worked and everything was installed into /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/sbin.

Hope that has helped someone.  The linux-atm package has been around for sometime but I didnt think the documentation or notes about how to change the path to pick up your distributions source code was that clear.

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As you may be aware the original Fedora Core 2 installation will just keep rebooting on an Epia Mini-ITX machine.  There are many newsgroups articles about this subject but I believe that they are all a little confusing so here is what I had to do to install Fedora Core 2 on to my Epia Mini-ITX CL600 machine.

First download the patch from http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/c3boot-2.iso and burn it on to a cd, then boot off of the new burnt cd.

The next set of instructions assume the text version of the installation

• Go into the text installation by typing linux text at the prompt
  
• Keep going through the installation until you get a warning message that the fedora disc is not in the drive, swap the original Fedora Core 2 disc 1 back into the drive.
  
• Go through the normal installation steps for Fedora Core 2 until it says the installation is complete, then remove the CD then type Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a console window.
  
• The original Fedora Core 2 disc had already ejected so replace that with the patched CD that you burnt before starting the installation.
  
• I then made a directory in /mnt/sysimage called source.
  
• I then mounted the patched cd onto that directory [Note: the cdrom device is in tmp on my installation not /dev like other instructions say]  mount /tmp/cdrom /mnt/sysimage/source -t iso9660
  
• Then chroot /mnt/sysimage
  
• rpm -Uvf /mnt/sysimage/source/kernel*
  
• once that has finished type Ctrl-Alt-F1 to go back to the original installation
  
• Reboot as per original installation and it should boot into a working kernel

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Apologies to all my customers, the sites are now back on.  We have replaced the firewall as the original one appeared to have an intermittant problem on the network controller.

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Ran the up2date on one of my Fedora 2 hosting machines and saw that samba has a new release 3.0.6.

Upgraded without any problem and also the throughput from the windows machines to this little box seemed to be faster or it could just be me imagining it.

I did have an odd problem where from time to time the windows drives mounted on the linux boxes seemed to hang.  This appears at first look to have now gone away.  Also the memory seemed to clock up really fast on the older version of Samba 3.0.5 and this doesnt seem to be happening, the memory is going up like there is a leak but much slower.

My linux machine is a mini-itx v800.

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