Since I just looked up the rules on when bash sources your .bashrc (and did some testing), here's the rules on what gets sourced when,for reasonably current versions of bash. Making this more confusingis that bash apparently uses heuristics for some of its decisions.

• login shells do not source your .bashrc ; they source only yourprofile (bash looks at various names, but I just use .profile ).
• non-login interactive shells source your .bashrc .
• shells started by ssh to run

My need to write an entry on how to force the outgoing interfaceon Linux handily illustratesthe problem of writing documentation when one is too closeto the problem (and hence the need to test documentation ).

At the time of the original entry , it was probably obvious to methat you had to combine the firewall marking approach with SNAT, so Ididn't bother explaining this explicitly. Indeed, reading carefully Ican see that I more or less said that in the entry, although not clearlyenough for me