need some clarification on IP forwarding

[Gary Yu]

Hi all,

for security purpose, we are going to turn off IP forwarding on our HP 11.0 systems, I know we can do it through ndd. But before I go ahead to do it, I just wanna get some more clarification on IP forwarding from someone who knows more on this topic.

1, We have "gated" turned off from /etc/rc.config.d/netconf, is it true that without gated, IP forwarding won't take effect even though it's been turned on by default?

2, we only have one NIC on each HP server, in such scenario, will IP forwarding take effect or not?

thanks for your input.

Gary

[harry d brown jr · Accepted solution]

Gary,

By default and because you only have one nic, it is turned off:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x78fdd211e18ad5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x67620719e045d6118fff0090279cd0f9,00.html

live free or die
harry

[Gary Yu]

Thanks harry for the response, actually, on our servers, 'ip_forwarding' is set to '2', means it's not on if I only have one interface (in I read the manual correctly). But just to get some more knowledge on this topic, I would like to know does ip-forwarding rely on 'gated' process to work?

[W.C. Epperson]

gated is a daemon that implements router advertisement/discovery protocols. If you're not running such a daemon on your server, it's less likely to be "seen" as a router. But if you don't turn off ipforwarding a multihomed HP-UX server will route between the interfaces if targeted (and reached) as a router(e.g. if someone sets it as the router for a routing table entry--like the default route).