It turns out to save on cpu and deal with some broken clients, conttrack doesn't checksum by default. I just turned it back on. echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_checksum echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/netfilter/ip_conntrack_checksum I think leaving it on is a good idea and will probably do so in a follow on release, but am open to opinions. AND: I think this is a bug in cero on larger networks. I have seen in the field timeouts (far) lower than 3600, and I think the rfc is 7200, and I have no idea why I put this in there... except that I used to (before I switched to mosh) maintain a lot of long running ssh sessions. net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established=432000 One behavior I've been battling, has been "after a while", a given radio would be able to forward packets around the internal network just fine. But: frequently you can get stuff through the gateway, but after a couple hops things would fail to return, so I first suspected crc (which I'm mostly putting down to the tcpdump tool not the network right now), then nat. So I can see the above value exausting the nat table... going to get rid of the double-nat today or tomorrow -- Dave Täht Fixing bufferbloat with cerowrt: http://www.teklibre.com/cerowrt/subscribe.html