LARTC - Mar 2004 - Linux Gateway with QoS without NAT possible?

<snip>I have one rack with a connection provider and several servers in 
it. 
All these servers have public IP adresses, and I would want to place a 
gateway so I can control traffic on all of them.

So it seems that I sould place a linux machine in the rack, connect all 
the servers with a switch and configure the default gateway on the 
machines to the new one.

This new one will be in the same network as the others (public IP) and 
I''d like this machine to act as a router/firewall/QoS but without doing
NAT.

What about incoming traffic? Would I have to ask the connection provider 
to reroute the incoming traffic to the gateway machine?</snip>

It sounds like you may be interested in a bridge. A bridge is more like a 
switch in that it has no IP address. This way, you can drop it in place 
between your rack machines and the ISP. Because it has no IP it will not 
impact your network topology as far as gateways etc. But since all the 
traffic is passing through it, you can filter some out (1st link) and 
apply QoS (3rd link).

<snip>Could you direct me to documents, tutorials, examples, 
howtos or whatever that could help me with this setup?</snip>

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Ethernet-Bridge-netfilter-HOWTO.html
http://bridge.sourceforge.net/index.html
http://www.compsci.lyon.edu/mcritch/dante/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BRIDGE-STP-HOWTO/index.html

HTH,
-Ron