If you ask me, everyone should have this enabled, indeed I think debian does by default. However there are some cases where you should. These involve having a "multihomed" internet connection, for instance if you have one of those satellite links where your outgoing data goes out a modem/isdn connection and you inbound comes down a sat-link. (almost all sat connections work this way) Cheers Nix At 06:44 PM 15/09/2000, you wrote:

...

Hi how well does "Source Address Verification" work by making the following setting.

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter

What does the rp_filter do & how does it work.

Can it cause any problems with your IPCHAINS rules?

Thanks in advance

Steven

Example: you have eth0 (192.168.0.1) as the internal network interface and eth1 (4.4.4.4) as the external iface.

rp_filter rejects packets with a source of 192.168.0/24 if they arrive on eth1.

More generally: It rejects incoming packets if the interface address that it arrives on does not match the respective routing table entry.

Roman. -- - - | Roman Drahtmüller // "Caution: Cape does | SuSE GmbH - Security Phone: // not enable user to fly." | Nürnberg, Germany +49-911-740530 // (Batman Costume warning label) | - -

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On Fri, 15 Sep 2000, Rainer Link wrote:

...

Hi how well does "Source Address Verification" work by making the following setting.

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/conf/*/rp_filter

What does the rp_filter do & how does it work. Quote from net/ipv4/fib_frontend.c

/* Given (packet source, input interface) and optional (dst, oif, tos): - (main) check, that source is valid i.e. not broadcast or our local address. - figure out what "logical" interface this packet arrived and calculate "specific destination" address. - check, that packet arrived from expected physical interface. */

int fib_validate_source(u32 src, u32 dst, u8 tos, int oif, struct device *dev, u32 *spec_dst, u32 *itag) Sorry, I forgot to mention Documentation/networking/ip-sysctl.txt. :-)

best regards, Rainer Link -- Rainer Link, SuSE GmbH, eMail: link@suse.de, Web: www.suse.de Developer of A Mail Virus Scanner (AMaViS): http://amavis.org/ Founder of Linux AntiVirus Project: http://lavp.sourceforge.net/