[wellylug] Broadband

[Tony Wills]

At 07:40 12/08/04 +1200, Jethro wrote:
>it looks like cable is the way to go. That's good, as I'm already on
>paradise. (I don't have to change email addresses)
>
>I'm planning to use a router, with firewalling to link the cable modem
>to my lan.
>
>http://www.dse.co.nz/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/411a761607a85a0a273fc0a87f9906b4/Product/View/XH1151
>
>Has anyone used this? It appears to be quite good (price, features -
>firewall, dhcp server, print server), but I don't know how if the
>printserver works for linux systems.

Why buy?

There's this quite good operating system called Linux that is great for 
building firewalls, dhcp servers, print servers ... and it's quite secure 
and comes with life time free updates :-)

If anyone wants to build dedicated firewalls I've got tons of retired 
computer bits that work just fine.  I use coyote linux 
(http://www.coyotelinux.com/products.php?Product=coyote) that runs off a 
floppy - 2.4.25 kernel, NAT, firewall, dhcp server, mini web server for 
admin, QoS.  Easy to setup port forwarding etc. Great for dialup or cable 
connection sharing.  Minimum hardware requirements are 486DX 
Motherboard+CPU, 16MB RAM,  a couple of network cards (or net card and 
modem), and a power supply.  (No harddisk, cdrom, keyboard, mouse nor 
screen needed, and you can build it into a case if you want to be tidy 
;-).  Of course if you want a 100Mbit network card to talk to your local 
lan (if say you've got a simple hub rather than a switch), then you'd 
probably need a pentium motherboard & cpu just so you'd have PCI as I don't 
think there are many ISA/VESA/EISA 100Mbit cards about.

I've got 4 or 5 of these in operation out there, no probs, they just go and 
go and go and ....
I'm running one with a seperate DMZ branch with a ftp/http server attached 
(now you know how I manage to use up 10GB/month ;-)

In the standard distribution there's no CUPs server available (not enough 
room), but then someone's probably found a way to squeeze it in (nor is 
there PCMCIA or USB support).  There are other floppy based and/or minimal 
hardware based dedicated firewall/router/server distributions about as well.

If anyone wants a bit of help with hardware, I'm happy to host a workshop 
building these things.

So why not try recycling a bit of old hardware instead of buying another 
bit of inflexible throw away plastic technology ;-)
(You may have worked out that I think they're great :-)