Adding a secondary IP address on Fedora Core

Every now and then I find another thing in Linux - or a particular distribution - that really impresses me. Tonight was one of those times. My home network is connected through a Fedora Core Linux box, to a wireless link to my communications shed up on the mountain above my house. The shed then has a ~6 mile wireless link to my office up at the Heber City Airport.

I have actually overlaid two different IP subnets on the wireless network, one being the small subnet provided by my DSL provider, and then other being a 10.x.x.x subnet that I created for a set of hosts that I use for testing. When I set up my Fedora Core Linux box as a home gateway, I gave it a public IP address that is part of the fixed range through my DSL modem. So I can get in and out of my house just fine, but was unable to access anything on the 10.x.x.x network from my house.

To resolve this, I had to bind a second address to the same NIC card ... something that I had done with other operatings systems in the past, but never with Linux. After a quick search on Google, I found a couple of articles that outlined a manual method of configuring this, and then realized that I ought to look at the GUI config tools that are a part of the Fedora distribution. I opened the Network Configuration tool, and simply clicked the "add" button ... chose the ethernet card, and provided address information. I was impressed that the tool added the new binding perfectly! I clicked the "activate" button, and up came the secondary IP address.

In a matter of 10 minutes I had the secondary binding working, and now have a host that is connected to both the public IP address range, and my private 10.x.x.x network through the same ethernet card. Yeah ... I know ... simple stuff. But I had to comment how impressed I was that the config tools managed this in such an intuitive way!

[tags: Linux Fedora]