socat vs iptables

[hellt]

Initially it seemed like a good idea to use iptables rules for mgmt traffic steering instead of multiple socat rules. Like a single rule could forward all traffic from a source to the dest.

Ref https://github.com/vrnetlab/vrnetlab/issues/191#issuecomment-1425162329 Socat rules can be substituted with an iptables rule

But after running this for a year we've seen many issues with iptables/nftables support on rhel-based derivatives specifically. Either nftables is not installed, or dnat kernel module is not present.

This kinda makes me steer more to socat again, and let iptables/nftables another 10 years to settle =)

[hellt]

for sros the work is in #230