I've heard that you can use a FreeBSD box as a dedicated network router

Frequently Asked Questions for FreeBSD 2.X : Networking : I've heard that you can use a FreeBSD box as a dedicated network router - is there any easy support for this?
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10.2. I've heard that you can use a FreeBSD box as a dedicated network router - is there any easy support for this?

Internet standards and good engineering practice prohibit us from providing packet forwarding by default in FreeBSD. You can enable this support by adding ``options GATEWAY'' to your kernel configuration file and recompiling.

This kernel option will put the sysctl variable net.inet.ip.forwarding to 1.

In most cases, you will also need to run a routing process to tell other systems on your network about your router; FreeBSD comes with the standard BSD routing daemon routed(8), or for more complex situations you may want to try GaTeD (available by FTP from gated.Cornell.edu) which supports FreeBSD as of 3_5Alpha7.

It is our duty to warn you that, even when FreeBSD is configured in this way, it does not completely comply with the Internet standard requirements for routers; however, it comes close enough for ordinary usage.