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!