On Mon August 16 2004 10:50 am, Thinker wrote:

Hello All,

I have just switched from Phone line DSL to Cable Modem Broadband. The bad news is, in order to get support from Adelphia, I have to use one of their preapproved cable modems for the connection.

The good news is, I have a spare machine and a couple of Network cards here that I can use for a router, and I hear that Linux is very good for just such a solution.

The question is, does the latest SuSE have an out-of-the-box fix for sharing a broadband connection? I am thinking I can come out of the cable modem into the Linux box on eth0 and have it handle the Firewall/Routing and DHCPing. Then come out of the linux box on eth1 to the switch and wireless access point connecting my other machines and my laptop to the network.

Make sense? If so, is SuSE my answer or should I be looking for another way to do this?

Thanks,

.:Thinker

Lots of answers to this. You can use SUSE's firewall on the spare machine and use http://susefaq.sourceforge.net/guides/fw_manual.html as a guide. There are other Linux firewall products such as Shorewall (http://shorewall.net/) and FWBuilder (http://www.fwbuilder.org/) and there are even CD or floppy based firewalls to get really secure. Webmin is also another option for configuring. There are the small home/office router/firewall/Ethernet switches put out by Linksys/Cisco, Netgear, SMC and others. Some of the Linksys and others are Linux based and there are 3rd party firmwares available that can make these very attractive alternatives to a full PC router/firewall. Less power consumption, no fan noise, dedicated to specific purpose without hard drives, floppies, CDs, etc to maintain. Short answer: yes, SUSE can be used for this. Long answer: yes, there are lots of choices! Stan

Quoting Thinker : [snip]

The question is, does the latest SuSE have an out-of-the-box fix for sharing a broadband connection? I am thinking I can come out of the cable modem into the Linux box on eth0 and have it handle the Firewall/Routing and DHCPing. Then come out of the linux box on eth1 to the switch and wireless access point connecting my other machines and my laptop to the network.

SuSE can do this fairly easily. It just takes some of your time. If you have more money than time, use a hardware router/firewall like those from LinkSyS, etc. <blatant plug> For help on setting up the firewall, see: http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=8989/ur0408c/ </plug> I have done it both ways. The firewall/router machine should not be your main machine. The other residents will not appreciate you "experimenting" and trashing their Internet connection. The firewall/router should be very stable, both hardware and software. Whichever route you go, keep it up to date. A Linux box will be more flexible and can be made more secure. A hardware router requires less space, less air conditioning, and less time. Put firewalls on all the computers in addition to the dedicated router/firewall, where available. E.g., my WinXP computer has a firewall because WinXP includes a firewall, the Win98 and Win2k computer do not. (Yes, I'm cheap.) All my Linux computers have firewalls. HTH, Jeffrey

Thinker wrote:

Hello All,

I have just switched from Phone line DSL to Cable Modem Broadband. The bad news is, in order to get support from Adelphia, I have to use one of their preapproved cable modems for the connection.

The good news is, I have a spare machine and a couple of Network cards here that I can use for a router, and I hear that Linux is very good for just such a solution.

The question is, does the latest SuSE have an out-of-the-box fix for sharing a broadband connection? I am thinking I can come out of the cable modem into the Linux box on eth0 and have it handle the Firewall/Routing and DHCPing. Then come out of the linux box on eth1 to the switch and wireless access point connecting my other machines and my laptop to the network.

Make sense? If so, is SuSE my answer or should I be looking for another way to do this?

Thanks,

.:Thinker

Thinker This will work a treat. I have been doing for years, in fact I don't bother with the spare machine - I just use my workstation as the router - although some do not recommend this I cannot see the problem, apart having to have your work station on all the time for the network. I set eth0 to DHCP and the cable modem picks up the IP address from my ISP and then I have a static IP addressed internal network. I suspect that if it is a home network you will not have that many computers to network, I find it easier that way to sort out any network issues. Just set eth1 as 192.168.0.1 and set the other computers in the network 192.169.0.2 etc. Point the default gateway in each of the networked puters to 192.168.0.1. Set up the fire wall on your router. One thing I have found is to make sure the firewalls of the networked boxen are off otherwise I have found issues with file sharing etc. Nick

Thinker wrote:

Hello All,

I have just switched from Phone line DSL to Cable Modem Broadband. The bad news is, in order to get support from Adelphia, I have to use one of their preapproved cable modems for the connection.

The good news is, I have a spare machine and a couple of Network cards here that I can use for a router, and I hear that Linux is very good for just such a solution.

The question is, does the latest SuSE have an out-of-the-box fix for sharing a broadband connection? I am thinking I can come out of the cable modem into the Linux box on eth0 and have it handle the Firewall/Routing and DHCPing. Then come out of the linux box on eth1 to the switch and wireless access point connecting my other machines and my laptop to the network.

Make sense? If so, is SuSE my answer or should I be looking for another way to do this?

Thanks,

.:Thinker

Some of us use BBIagent, http://BBIagent.net which is a floppy install and accessed from a remote browser that's java enabled or using javaws. It lets you set up everything in a simple manner without having to delve into NAT internals, it's very flexible, I use it to pass ports for internal machines for hamradio VOIP, gtk-gnutella, gnomemeeting, Cisco VPN to our corporate servers when I was a working fellow, etc. The only thing is it looks like it's not been developed in a while. The guy was hoping to sell a package that would allow saving the config to floppy or other media, so when I have to take it down and up again, it takes a few minutes to set it up again. I'm just using an old Cyrix M200+, 16M, 2x ethernet cards and a floppy. Does the business, though I'm thinking of getting something on CD, I've seen others, but searching on freshmeat last night, I couldn't find any - forgot the names of the ones I've seen. If you want a Rolls Royce setup, http://www.astaro.com, it does the works, anti-virus spam, content filtering, VPN, multiple ethernet connections to the inside/outside etc., I gather it's a big hit with the Corporates and it's free to thee and me. I first used it about 5+ years ago, then it only supported the internal etherenet and dial-up. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer =====LINUX ONLY USED HERE=====