Special Edition Using Linux®, Sixth Edition

IP Masquerading, Network Address Translation, and Port Forwarding

This chapter, by its title, purports to discuss IP Masquerading. And in fact, it does. If you participate in any Linux mailing lists you'll undoubtedly see this term come up. But IP Masquerading as such has changed its status with the new Linux 2.4.x series kernels and the framework software that handles IP address rewriting and mangling.

Linux now uses the netfilter software through a userland interface called iptables to perform stateful packet filtering, which you can read about in Chapter 36, "IP Firewalling." It uses the same userland interface to perform network address translation (NAT), masquerading, and port forwarding.

If you're not familiar with the concept of NAT,