Hi: Certainly with some distributions, more than the kernel have been modified to an extent to allow proper installation. Debian is the one I'm most familiar with and I know some other things have been modified in the install routein to allow it to install in a friendly manner. So even if you *could* throw a kernel into a CD image and get it back on to CD, it's not a recommended way of going about it. I didn't understand your query about linuxconf and its dependancies. In response to another point you made, if you have a network (i.e. 2 machines or more) that you want to share one IP address, you must use IP masquerading. Why? Because. Here's 2 examples. Example one: Your gateway machine has the shared IP address and also has a private address on an internal network (e.g. 10.0.0.1). Another internal machine has an internal network address of 10.0.0.2. Any requests from this internal machine to the net will almost certainly go unanswered, as the 10.0.0.2 address is unrouted any further out than your local network. If you ask some other router on the network what and where that address is, it either won't know or may even point you to some other machine on *it's* network. Anyway, the result is no worky. Example two: 2 machines on your network are assigned the same IP address. Boy, this is asking for trouble. Requests to the net will again go out, but will be returned to your gateway machine and not the internal one. And that's assuming it even goes out. Your gateway machine won't particularly like your routing table, as it'll have 2 entries for the same address. You may get around it by putting in a host entry for that internal machine, but providing this doesn't confuse it too badly, then no requests made from your gateway machine will then be received by it, as it'd probably get shunted off to your internal machine. Again, no good. The situation is simple. If you only have one connection to the net, then the machines on your network need to have propper routed internet IP addresses or you need to use IP masquerading. If you have a mixture of the two, you will still need to run IP masquerading *IF* you want the machine(s) with private addresses to access the net. Probably the only exception to this is where an internal machine is providing a service accessable from the outside that the gateway machine does not. In this case, you'd set up the gateway machine to forward all these requests to the internal machine. Geoff. -- Geoff Shang <gshang10 at scu.edu.au> ICQ number 43634701
