Re: home network question
On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Andrew D Dixon wrote:
>Hi all,
>I'm currently running potato on my desktop machine and I'd like to
>configure it so that I can share it's ppp connection with my laptop over
>an ethernet connection. Anybody have any advice on how I should set
>this up?
Hi
I also have a Debian box with a modem for connecting to the Internet,
and an a local LAN (a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 PC and one running
FreeBSD 3.2). I assume that you have a dial-up or similar Internet
connection, where you are assigned only ONE IP address when you
connect. For your local LAN, in this case, you should use IP addresses
of the form 192.168.x.y, where x is the same, and y is different for all
the machines you want on your LAN, eg 192.168.0.1 for your desktop and
192.168.0.2 for your laptop. These IP addresses are reserved for people
setting up local LANS, and are not used on the Internet.
To allow your LAN to use the Internet, the box with the PPP connection
must perform "IP Masquerading", which will pass packets from machines on
the LAN to the Internet, through the PPP link, and will make it appear
that these packets came from itself. When the host on the Internet
returns packets, the masquerading box will pass them back to the machine
on the LAN which requested them.
This is fairly high-level magic, and is not included in the Debian
installation kernel, (AFAIK), so you will need to recompile your kernel
from source. For complete information about IP Masquerading, and other
things you will need to know to set it up, install the package
"doc-linux-text", "doc-linux-html" or go to http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/
to get the Linux HOWTO's, and read at least the following:
Networking HOWTO, IP Masquerade HOWTO, IPCHAINS HOWTO, Kernel HOWTO.
It may take a bit of effort to set up, but once you have, it just works,
and you won't need to worry about it again, and won't know how you
managed to live without it.
Nothing special need be done to the other machines on the LAN, except
that they need to have a default route to your masquerading box, which
is usually done by specifying the masq. box as the network's gateway
when setting up the network cards on these machines. The machines on
the LAN will also need to be given the address of a nameserver, either
one on your masq. box which is set up to forward queries to another
nameserver on the Internet, (In which case you can also read the DNS
Howto, and set up DNS records for you LAN), or a nameserver address
provided by your ISP, in which case you will need to use the /etc/hosts
file on each machine to record the names of other machines on the LAN.
Hope this give you a start.
Simon Hales
My ICQ Number is:- 89224228
Powered by Debian/GNU Linux 2.2 (http://www.debian.org)
>Thanks,
>Andy
>
>P.S. I've got a Netgear FA510c pcmcia ethernet card for my notebook that
>doesn't seem to be detected. Anybody have any luck with these?
Sorry, never used PCMCIA devices at all, so can't help :-(
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