Check if IP Forwarding is enabled
Using sysctl:
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0
Enable IP Forwarding on the fly
As with any sysctl kernel parameters we can change the value of net.ipv4.ip_forward on the fly (without rebooting the system):
sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
Permanent setting using /etc/sysctl.conf
If we want to make this configuration permanent the best way to do it is using the file /etc/sysctl.conf where we can add a line containing net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
/etc/sysctl.conf:
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
if you already have an entry net.ipv4.ip_forward with the value 0 you can change that 1.
To enable the changes made in sysctl.conf you will need to run the command:
sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf
On RedHat based systems this is also enabled when restarting the network service:
service network restart
and on Debian/Ubuntu systems this can be also done restarting the procps service:
/etc/init.d/procps.sh restart
Using distribution specific init scripts
Although the methods presented above should work just fine and you would not need any other method of doing this, I just wanted to note that there are also other methods to enable IP Forwarding specific to some Linux distributions.
For example Debian based distributions might use the setting:
/etc/network/options:
ip_forward=no
set it to yes and restart the network service.
Also RedHat distributions might set this using:
/etc/sysconfig/network:
FORWARD_IPV4=true
and again restart the network service.
Regardless the method you have used once you have completed this you can check it out using the same method shown above:
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward
net.ipv4.ip_forward = 1
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
1
If the result is 1 then the Linux system will start forwarding IP packets even if they are not destined to any of its own network interfaces.