persistent NAT setup

categories: blog

Often having some tablet or smartphone running linux connected to my usb port and I always have to look up how to enable NAT-ing on my laptop so that those devices can access the internet via usb-ethernet connection. So here is how to do it:

sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE

But I will not need this reminder anymore because this is how to make the setup persistant between reboots:

$ echo net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1 > /etc/sysctl.d/ip_forward.conf
$ cat /etc/iptables/rules.v4
*nat
-A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
COMMIT

The content in /etc/iptables/rules.v4 is normally generated via iptables-save so there might be some extra work needed to combine this with possible existing content. The initscript required to run iptables-restore with this file as input is provided as the iptables-persistent package.

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