My old linux box was old as dirt and was noisy and energy inefficient. It was a circa 2007 dell with an original amd64 x2, one of the first amd dual cores. I decided to replace it with one of those alienware steam machines, and I must say I am happy with it. I wanted hardware bang for the buck and I got it cheap on amazon, it was less than 400 bucks for a i3 3.2ghz with 8 gigs or ram, a decent video card, and a terabyte hard drive with 802.11ac and steamOS which is based on debian squeeze. It was a breeze accessing the desktop and adding the debian repositories and installing things like mplayer, kodi, vlc, and even libreoffice. Even with steam always running in the background it was only using 2 gigs of ram while idle thanks to the small footprint of debian and gnome shell. I would recommend this to anyone who wants a small desktop and wants linux and doesn't want to spend a whole lot of money, and of course enjoys gaming.
I only had one problem with it, I wanted to share the 802.11ac connection over ethernet so I can have a small fast wired network from the wireless in my bedroom. I installed firewalld and and used nm-connection-editor to set up sharing of the wired ethernet connection. I have it connected to a roku, a blueray player, and and xbox 360 on a wired connection using a small cisco switch. I wanted to take advantage of the blazing fast 802.11ac wireless. Even after reboots and restarting the network manager it fails to connect. Here's what the syslog says:
desktop@steamos:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart
[ ok ] Restarting network-manager (via systemctl): network-manager.service.
desktop@steamos:~$ sudo tail /var/log/syslog
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete FORWARD --source
10.42.0.0/255.255.255.0 --in-interface eth0 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete FORWARD --in-interface eth0 --out-interface eth0 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete FORWARD --out-interface eth0 --jump REJECT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete FORWARD --in-interface eth0 --jump REJECT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete INPUT --in-interface eth0 --protocol udp --destination-port 67 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete INPUT --in-interface eth0 --protocol tcp --destination-port 67 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete INPUT --in-interface eth0 --protocol udp --destination-port 53 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <info> Executing: /sbin/iptables --table filter --delete INPUT --in-interface eth0 --protocol tcp --destination-port 53 --jump ACCEPT
Jul 23 12:20:40 steamos NetworkManager[5502]: <warn> (eth0) firewall zone remove failed [28]: (32) COMMAND_FAILED: '/sbin/iptables -D INPUT_ZONES -t filter -i eth0 -g IN_public' failed: iptables: No chain/target/match by that name.
Jul 23 12:22:29 steamos wpa_supplicant[1018]: wlan0: WPA: Group rekeying completed with 60:e3:27:78:61:9b [GTK=CCMP]
iptables has everything allowed by default. I know I could use dnsmasquerading and edit lots of files in etc to get this working but I don't want to do that. I'd just like to let the network manager take care of this. Any clues as to what I'm missing? I don't care if it works through NAT or bridged networking so long as I can start and stop it with the network manager gui.
--
Michael Lazin
to gar auto estin noein te kai ennai