Re: DSL vs. cable and LAN options
On Sun, Jan 07, 2001 at 09:02:21PM -0800, Tom Marshall wrote:
| I don't have any experience with DSL, but I can tell you about the AT&T @home
| setup. Most of the networking stuff should apply to either, but you
| should *insist* on an external adapter with a ethernet connector to your box.
|
| I've been using a 5x86-133 machine for my linux masq gateway for about 4
| years and it been connected to analog modem, ISDN, and cablemodem in its
| day. It never has to work hard, even sustaining close to 1mbit throughput
| on the cablemodem, so I would imagine a 486 is just fine. Of course, you
| will probably want to do kernel compiles elsewhere and copy the image to the
| 486 box. ;-)
Actually, the 486 box isn't mine. It has windows on it and would be
connected to the service through my PII 300 with Debian (the masq box). I am hoping to get an old 486 machine sometime and set it up as the masq (& web) server.
|
| The masq box is setup with two ethernet cards. One is connected to your
| DSL/cablemodem and the other to your hub/switch. Setup shouldn't be
| difficult if you read the relevant masq documentation. You will probably
| want to investigate running some services such as a caching DNS server and
| web proxy. It's a nice learning experience and it can improve your network
| throughput even more.
|
Cool. I'll have to look into this.
| AT&T @home service uses DHCP but the DHCP server always allocates the same
| IP to your box. This is done so that it's easier to rearrange IP addresses
| (for them) should they ever need to. However, the technicians are told to
| set the machine to the assigned static IP if anything goes wrong (and it's
| not uncommon for @home DHCP to be down). I've been using my static IP since
| I got the service because their DHCP (and DNS) was down the day it was
| installed.
|
| If you do get a broadband connection, be sure to setup a decent ipchains
| firewall script and/or run some sort of intrusion detection system because
| the broadband IP ranges are frequently scanned by hax0rs for vulnerable
| systems. AT&T @home scans all of their clients for news servers (port 119)
| routinely, so whatever you do, don't setup a news server -- even by mistake.
|
Is there a general disapproval from service providers regarding
servers? I wasn't planning on a news server, but I do have a web
server and ftp server (in addtion to sshd) on my machine. If possible
I would also like to run a mailing list.
Thanks (all who replied) for all the great info!
-D
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