On Monday 19 July 2010 12:01:55 Dan McGhee wrote: > I've never really taken the time to sit down and learn the "nits and > grits' of networking. I don't have enough knowledge to even make me > dangerous. Over the years I've not ever really had anything to worry > about because I had a hard-wired internet connection at home and > whenever I went to "hotspots," things just seemed to work. Because of > this laptop, I now have a router, which, so far, I've used only to > connect to the internet. It's possible that in the future, I may want > to establish a network here in the house to access at least the printer > on my PC. > > It's now time for me to customize the /etc/hosts file, and, obviously, I > have a NIC. This is the file from my other laptop which runs LFS-6.3, > uses a PCMCIA card and can connect to my router:
1. Your router's WAN port has the address assigned by ISP. This address is your public address. 2. Your router's LAN port has an address from one of the private ranges, typically 192.168.0.0/16 (google 'CIDR'). This address is the default gateway for your LAN. If its firmware is decent, the router will also have a built-in DNS server or proxy; if so, this address will also be the DNS server for your LAN. 3. Your router has a DHCP server that assigns addresses to hosts on your LAN that ask for one. By default, it randomly assigns an address in its configured range. 4. Your router's DHCP server also allows you to specify which hosts get which IP addresses, based on the host's NIC MAC address. These are known as static addresses. 5. If you want to manage your LAN's IP address usage in one place, do it with DHCP on your router. Assign static addresses to all hosts, including printers. The result will be that all hosts will be able to reach all others by name (they will all query the router to translate the name to an IP address). Your printers and file sharing will just work (unless you have Winders mixed in; its firewall usually prevents file sharing from working. 6. A good book for learning about networking, network security and traffic control, from the basics to inter-metropolitan WANs, is "Designing and Implementing Linux Firewalls and QoS using netfilter, iproute2, and L7-filter" (2006, Lucian Gheorghe, Packt Publishing, ISBN 1-904811-65-5). If you are persistent in googling, you can find a PDF online to review. After perusing the PDF, I ordered the book; and I've been configuring networks for 20 years. -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
