IP Forwarding

IP Forwarding is more commonly reffered to as routing. Routers connect and facilitate communication between multiple networks. When you try to find site on an outside network, it needs a gateway address. This corresponding to the IP address of a route on LAN.

To use RHEL system as router, you should enable IP forwarding in the /etc/sysctl.conf configuration by changing

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0

to

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1

The changes take effect on the next reboot. Until then ip forwarding can be enabled with the below command

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

You need to enable routing through the firewalls for communication to other networks.

# iptables -A FORWARD –o wlan0 –j ACCEPT

# iptables -A FORWARD –o virbr0 –j ACCEPT

# iptables -A FORWARD –o virbr1 –vimj ACCEPT