I’m getting a new gateway/router FreeBSD box ready to take place of the one with the flaky hard disk. I built a new kernel with firewall, natting and tweaked the various /etc files based on the old box’s settings. After rebooting I couldn’t get it to connect to the network even though the box got it’s initial IP address via DHCP. I fiddled with various settings in rc.conf and manually did various combinations of ifconfig and route but still there was “no route to host.” Finally I realized I had included the directive, options IPFILTER_DEFAULT_BLOCK in the kernel. This worked too well. I commented this out and used options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT instead. Come to think of it, IPFILTER and IPFIREWALL might be prefixes to different sets of programs, namely ipfw and ipfilter. Well, it’s been a rainy and cool (4 or 5°C) day so that indoor activities were called for anyway.