Last weekend I decided it was time again to completely update my eeePC. So I ran the command tantrum everybody knows:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
and that gave me 287 new and updated packages.
After that I needed to reboot because I got a lot of new stuff.
Well, there the trouble began. No X, no network, no mouse, no USB etc. It was in a terrible state.
Live's good and the problem is simple. Having a Linux server at home
with two virtual machines running within VMware server, I would like to
have a tunnel to the host OS and forward ports for smtp, imap,
rdp and maybe some others.
I thought this could simply be solved with IPtables, but that turned out to be a big pain in the *ss. It didn't work as I wanted, I locked myself out several times and still it didn't do exactly as I wanted.
Telling a coworker of mine (Thanks Jacco) he stumbled on a simple tool, called
rinetd. It can only do one thing, but does that very well. It can forward
an incoming TCP port request to another machine on any port. The configuration
is so simple, anybody can understand it, even I did.
My config looks like:
logfile /var/log/rinetd.log
logcommon
0.0.0.0 25 192.168.63.8 25
0.0.0.0 83 192.168.63.8 83
0.0.0.0 143 192.168.63.8 143
0.0.0.0 3389 192.168.63.2 3389
Start the daemon with this config file and everything works. Could not be easier.
To bad nobody maintains this, my version is dated 2003-04-13. Maybe I will, when time permits.
Take a look at the rinetd homepage and be amazed.
Within a mixed Linux and Microsoft Windows network I ran into the following problem:
A host with the hostname linux1.firm.local could be pinged and found
with nslookup and dig, but it was impossible to start a ssh session.
The result kept being: Unknown host.
Playing Cherlock Holmes revealed that this had to do with Avahi and
mdns, so with the .local part of the hostname.
In my /etc/nsswitch.conf the hosts: line read:
(Using Ubuntu 8.04)
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
This results in searching the IP address of the host through mdns4_minimal.
The .local domain now spoils it for me (use strings on mdns4_minimal
and be amazed.
The problem can be solved very easy. Just replace the hosts: line in the
/etc/nsswitch.conf with:
hosts: files dns mdns4
See also: Avahi
