Hello all, just set up my first Linode instance and the one thing I'm struggling with is networking between Linode instances. I've had a lot of experience with VMWare so I understand the basics and I've run instances connected to virtual switches. So, is every node permanently connected to the public internet via its public IP? There isn't a concept of a private network where you can hide instances behind a firewall node?

It isn't possible to disassociate the public IP, AFAIK. You can, however, hide instances behind a firewall by adding a private IP to each instance and then configuring everything except the firewall to drop packets sent to the public IP. In Linux, the latter could be done with "iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -j DROP" (assuming eth0 corresponds to the public IP).

Thanks, this answers my question