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  • 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • This is extremely possible and I have done a lot of stuff like it (I set up my first home built Linux firewall over 20 years ago). You do want to get some kind of multiport network card (or multiple network cards… usb -> ethernet adapters can do OK filling in in a pinch). It also gives you a lot of power if you want to do specific stuff with specific connections (sub netting, isolation of specific hosts, etc).

    There’s a lot of ways to do it, but the one I’m most familiar with is just to use IP tables.

    The very first thing you want to do is open up /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and change the 0 to a 1 to turn on network forwarding.

    You want to install bridge-utils and isc-dhcp-server (or some other DHCP server). Google or get help from an LLM to configure them, because they’re powerful and there’s a lot of configs. Ditto if you want it to handle DNS. But basically what you’re going to do (why you need bridge-utils) is you’re going to set up a virtual bridge interface and then add all the various NICs you want on your LAN side into it (or you can make multiple bridges or whatever… lots of possibilities).

    Your basic iptables rule is going to be something like

    iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o enp1s0 -j MASQUERADE, but again there’s lots of possible IP tables rules so read up on those.












  • Mint.

    I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.

    Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma. My dad’s been running it for five years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”). It was also my son’s first OS when he was about 8.





  • Idea 1:

    Print out some of the various CLI cheat sheets and pin them to your wall by where you work on your computer.

    Maybe this one:

    Then, print a page with commands you commonly use, either with more complex syntax or that aren’t on the sheet. (Like, “ls” is on there, but “ls -s -h” is not, for example.

    Idea 2:

    Write bash scripts to automate some of your commonly used tasks. Comment them. Imagine someone else is going to have to use them, even if you’re the only one who’s ever going to look at them. Not only will this help you learn lots of commands and force you to describe what they do (which will help you retain the information), it will be there as a record of how it works that you can go back and look at months or years later, to remind yourself how to do something.