Hey Guys, my first post --

Anyone running a standalone type firewall such as those I mentioned by building a local VM and dd the disk? I seem to have issues mounting the disk on my linode (unknown filetype), but I know they are ext3 and specify this.

I moved on to attempting to setup Iptables on a linode to act as a dedicated firewall which can NAT traffic to the LAN behind it. After setting the client linodes to use the gateway of the firewall I cannot ping external IP's. Not sure if there is an issue doing this without 2 NIC interfaces vs virtual interfaces (eth0,eth0:0).

Just trying to see if others are running similar solutions and see whats possible.

As far as using IPtables and attempting to NAT -- I believe I have confirmed this will not work with virtual interfaces (eth:0:0 will be seen as eth0 by the kernel)

So, I guess at this point trying to use something like Smoothwall, pfSense, or IPFire will not accomplish this either running on a Linode. Since I assume it will fall under the same principle when setting up NAT's.

Please correct me if someone is running a similar setup for what I am trying to accomplish here.

You could also look into Shorewall, which is an easy-to-use iptables-based firewall. It's available as prebuilt packages on most distros (including all of the distros that are available via Linode).