Driving me NATty

What is it with computers? No matter how many years you’ve been using them they can still surprise you as to just how awkward they can be. This weekend, I tried to bridge my upstairs and downstairs networks using wireless....fat chance.

You’d think that getting a relatively obscure wireless ethernet card working on Linux would be a pain. It’s not supported directly in the kernel, so I had to grab some additional drivers. I was not holding out much hope, to be honest — but amazingly it all worked first time. Within a few minutes of downloading the driver, it was all up and running. However, this lulled me into a false sense of security…

Upstairs I have a DLink 604+ ADSL router which acts as my NAT and modem. There’s currently a long self-installed RJ45 cable winding its way down the stairs to the kitchen where my 3 PCs live (don’t ask). I was hoping to use the wireless card to replace the cable with an invisible link and thus win the favour of my girlfriend.

So, I duly configured downstairs as being 192.168.1. and upstairs as 192.168.0.. I added the relevant routes to each subnet, with the linux box (with both a normal ethernet connection and the wireless) as the gateway between them. I rejoiced as I disconnected the upstairs/downstairs lead and yet I was still able to ping the router from my windows boxes downstairs — all was working!

Until…I realised I couldn’t access the Internet from the windows boxes. Try as I might, the router was rejecting packets from the downstairs subnet, giving me ‘network unreachable’ ICMP replies. It would seem that the router only NATs outgoing packets from its local subnet — 192.168.1.* it wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. No amount of misconfiguring netmasks got me anywhere — except one moment when I thought I had it working only to discover I’d plugged the up/downstairs cable back in…outgoing packets were getting upstairs via wireless, but back down the wire. Arse.

I also tried bridging the two segments with the ethernet bridge kernel configuration…but sadly that caused massive loopback problems; effectively the router itself (which has both RJ45 and wireless) is already an ethernet bridge it would seem — whenever I bridged the two nets downstairs I’d get a slew of packets pinging back and forth upstairs/downstairs and still no access to the internet.

The only way I could think of doing things was to re-NAT on the linux box so all the packets appear to come from it — then the router will happily NAT outbound again — but that’s a right old pain that I don’t want just yet.

All in all, a bit of a nightmare. Something that seemed simple, turned out to be a right pain. Don’t you just love computers?