On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 22:30, kilauea wrote: > Aloha ! I haven't been on the list in quite some time. Just had a > question about cable modem service. Oceanic will be hooking up my > service in the next week and I wanted to find out if there is a current > FAQ or HOWTO on Oceanic (Road Runner?) service. A couple of years ago I > had a one way cable modem (HSA Kauai) and used DHCP to get an IP > address. The Oceanic service will be two way: Most Excellent. > Is there any thing else I should be thinking of: /etc/hosts, > /etc/hosts.allow, gateway setting, firewall settings? I know enough to > tweak things but I am far from a sys adm in understanding. I have a > couple of machines on a home network. How should I configure the > firewall on the machine that connects to the cable modem? I have Grub > booting four flavors of Linux (Slack and RH primarly) and I am mostly > interested in web and ftp access. Any examples or pointers will help; I > will try LDP for the latest Howto (DHCP / cable modem). > Also they want to use the USB port. I had my last cable modem connected > by ethernet and don't know if there is any special settings needed for > USB. I have fast ethernet running already but I have not used the USB > port before although it looks like the ports are recognized.
You will find that Oceanic's cable modems are exceedingly easy to use with Linux. The Toshiba cable modems that I have seen them use more recently have both a USB and Ethernet connector. I have never tried to use the USB in Linux, although I suspect it might be possible, I believe it is not worth the hassle when the ethernet works fine. You simply set the Linux ethernet interface to DHCP, and it will grab the IP/subnetmask/gateway/DNS. I didn't fully understand your questions, but it sounds like you want to run web and FTP servers? Technically they are against Oceanic Time Warner's (not sure about Earthlink) TOS, but they haven't been cracking down on that locally AFAIK. If you use it for strictly personal reasons and traffic is very low I am guessing they wouldn't care. Regarding FTP server, DO NOT USE IT because it is inherently unsafe. Use ssh instead to protect yourself. There are many easy and free ssh/scp/sftp clients available for Linux, Windows and MacOS X so there is no excuse for anyone to continue to use FTP these days. (But if you use the FTP server only on your local LAN, that is fairly safe.) http://www.mplug.org/phpwiki/index.php/BasicFirewallRouter Follow this simple guide to learn how to quickly setup a Linux box with two ethernet cards into a "cable/dsl sharing router". The internal LAN plugged into eth1 can then share the Internet connection with little fuss. If you have any questions about the details of setting this up please ask here. MonMotha the firewall author is a member of this mailing list, and many other subscribers are very familiar with it so they should be able to answer your questions quickly. Finally, are you aware of how to automatically download and apply security updates for your Linux distribution? It is exceedingly easy and free to do so on Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE/Conectiva/Debian (but less so on Slackware), so please do so in order to prevent yourself from being a victim one day. ANY box not maintained, be it Windows or Linux, will be insecure within a month or two. And they WILL find you, even if you think your box is unimportant. They actually WANT to crack seemingly unimportant boxes because they can use your system as an attack platform for a longer period of time while you don't notice that you were compromised. Anyhow, please heed this warning, and ASK if you don't know how to use the automatic update tools. We will help you. Warren Togami [EMAIL PROTECTED]
