Did I take down the whole Middle School with NAT?

[Joseph Hartman]

Hey all, the Middle School has generally been without Internet since last
week. Today the district guy came out and we figured out that one of my LTSP
servers was screwing things up b/c the machines not connecting to the
Internet were getting IP addresses of 192.168.0.___ instead of 10.36.___.___
like they should. The problem SEEMED to go away as soon as I ran up to the
lab and disconnected my newly configured NAT LTSP server with firefox
running as a local app (BTW, everything in the lab was working perfectly up
until this little snafu). I never had a problem with the lab when firefox
ran off the server.

Also, I installed NAT on my own classroom LTSP server a couple of weeks ago,
it's working perfectly, and there haven't been any problems at all with any
computers on this side of campus, so maybe it was just a coincidence?

So here are my questions:
Is it possible that enabling NAT on that server has also enabled the server
to start distributing IP addresses to other machines around campus that
aren't directly connected to the switch in the lab? Or was this just a
strange coincidence?

If it was not a coincidence, is there any way to restrict the NAT server so
that it only serves IP addresses to the thin clients (like restricting it to
certain MAC addresses or something)?

If not, what options do I have to keep firefox as a local app? Would using
the Thin Client Proxy Redirect
howto<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ThinClientProxyRedirect>work
for me?

Thanks so much guys. For now the lab is down, but I'm hoping to get it back
up before the week is out. Cheers -joe
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