Chapter 18: More Packet Filtering

Overview

Office net seems slow,
Thanks to MP3 swapping.
Let's stop that right quick!

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to keep undesired traffic out while permitting acceptable traffic, let's look at some ways you can rearrange and manipulate network traffic.

A common trick to make one IP address seem like many is Network Address Translation (NAT), a very popular feature among small network administrators. NAT requires the ability to arbitrarily redirect network connections, so we'll discuss that next. Another useful feature is the ability to manage bandwidth for particular tasks, which OpenBSD supports through queuing.