Hi all,
I have an interesting problem.
I have a home network consisting of 4 workstations connected through 100Mbit Ethernet and a hub. I also have a Linux box ("router") with two interfaces - Ethernet and wlan - that is supposed to provide Internet access to the PCs in the network.
The provider gave me 6 consecutive IP addresses in the private range that they use. All of them are in the same 128-address subnet (netmask is 255.255.255.128). So, I assigned 4 of them to the workstations and one to each router interface. I can add a few entries to the routing table so that packets from the workstations are passed on to the provider's gateway (tell the workstations to use router's eth0 as their GW, add a default route to wlan0 in the router's routing table). So far so good.
However, the provider did not update their routing tables to account for the new router, and is very slow in doing so. (I can't complain much, they are non-profit and thus very cheap, and I don't want to go elsewhere.) Result is, IMHO, that their gateway, whenever a packet for any of my machines arrives, tries to find its MAC address through ARP, and then, since it does not succeed, throws the packet away. (Is my reasoning correct?)
Unfortunately, the simplest solution - NAT - is not an option. The provider does not allow NAT within their network and seems to be very fussy about it. ("Don't use NAT, if you need to connect more machines, we'll give you as many IPs as you need. If we find out that you use NAT, we'll kick you out.")
So, what I'd like to do is make my router somewhat "transparent" - meaning that I want it to operate in such a way that the provider's gateway does not need to know it's there. I want its wlan0 interface to respond to ARP requests for all 6 IPs, returning the wlan0 MAC. Then, when a packet arrives at that interface, forward it to eth0 appropriately. And I need your help in doing that - what utilities do I need, and how do I set it up?
Or, any other idea that would let all my workstations access the Internet (well, apart from buying a wlan card and an antenna for each one of them :-) is welcome.
Thanks in advance,
Joe_h
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