[wellylug] ADSL modem and Linux router/firewall without double NAT

[Daniel Reurich]

On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 12:27 +1300, David Harrison wrote:
> I am just wondering why you would want to do this in the first place?
> 
Because he doesn't trust crappy firmware and lack of resources on the
modems.  I don't trust them either.
> 
> Decent ADSL routers are reliable and provide tools for forwarding some
> or all Internet ports to an internal IP address.
> 
Depends on what you mean by decent and reliable.  

They work for your average joe who doesn't know and/or doesn't care.
Their firewall capabilities tends to be less than average with very
basic port forwarding.  But that's about the best you can expect with a
few meg of ram and a few meg of flash.  They tend to fail under heavy
use especially with large downloads (usually because of internal counter
overflows)
> 
> Seems to me (without a clear use case) you are creating a problem
> where one doesn't exist.

Absolutely not.  The use case is clear.  If your want a reliable
internet connection and decent firewalling it's an absolute must to
bypass the modems poor routing capabilities and use a real firewall
setup running on a real OS. 

(actually most modems use a barstardized linux OS these days, but they
still fail miserably on the capabilities, and the counter intuitive web
interfaces are really bad.)

Daniel