Hello, Derek. I have a couple of wild and crazy ideas about this matter. Firstly, a quick and dirty fix for you. Pop the NIC out of the firewall machine, and drop it into one of your other machines with a full blown OS on it. Configure the DSL modem with that machine. Then put the card back into the firewall box, and, as if by magic, your firewall will be using the same MAC address as the machine it was configured with and your DSL modem should be happy. Secondly, and this one is a bit more technical, and may even be wrong (I'm sure someone will correct me if my logic is flawed), but if the firewall is running NAT, then does it really matter which machine configures the DSL modem ? With NAT enabled, all outgoing packets inherit the IP and MAC address of the NAT machine's external interface. Therefore, you should be able to hook up your firewall machine to the DSL modem, and configure it from any of the machines behind the firewall. I am assuming you have NAT enabled so as to hide the other machines from the DSL modem. Bye for now, Stuart.
Derek Fountain <derekfountain@yahoo.co.uk> 12/30/02 07:26AM >>> => Does it carry a web browser that supports frames and => Javascript, and can I => install it onto a box with no CD drive?
Well, it's small, has a very good support page, requires no CD-ROM (I assume you could FTP it to the box ??), and is configured by editing a couple of fully-commented conf files...
If it doesn't carry a copy of Mozilla, Netscape4/7 or Konqueror, I won't be able to configure my ADSL modem with it. The modem is configured using a browser interface, and will only subsequently work when used from the same MAC address as it was configured from. That was the reason I switched from Smoothwall, which is a fine firewall, to SuSE in the first place.