Rosemary McGillicuddy wrote: > By mistake I bought an Ethernet 8 port Ethernet switch on an on-line > auction, I was looking for a router and got very confused with > terminology. Anyway - is it possible to network two PCs using this > switch, to share dial up modem and printer. I thought the answer was > yes, and tried MCC > Network sharing, but obviously need to do something > more, maybe in second box which is mepis. > Thanks > > PS been looking at router prices and look quite a lot to me, in my > situation at present. The terms router, hub, and switch are very > confusing to me , and difficult to distinguish in on-line descriptions. Rosemary, You can use this switch for your networking. In a lot of ways, it will probably work out better for you. What you need to do is configure the box with the modem with a static IP address in its ethernet interface. Do NOT set a gateway address or default route on this interface. The default route will be over your modem connection, and will get set when you make the dialup connection. For your second machine, you have a couple of choices. You can set this one up with a static IP address, and use the IP address of the first machien as the gateway for the default route. Or you can run a dhcp server ont he first machine, and let it set things for the second machine. Both ways work fine.
For a quick setup, to make sure your network works, a static IP may be the better way to go. Make sure your cabling and such is working right, and then add features. You can do this manual from the command line. Machine with modem. ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.1 Second machine. ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.2 route add default gw 192.168.1.1 You can then use ping to make sure they can see each other. If you have the ssh service running on one machine, you can use ssh from the other machine to log into it, and make sure everything works. At this point, I would consider setting up dnsmasq on the modem machine, and letting it provide dhcp service for the network. It has the advantage of providing DNS for the local network, as well as forwarding requsets from the second machine to your ISP's name servers as set by your modem connection. It gets the names for the local network from /etc/hosts on the machine it is running on, as well as from the dhcp leases it gives out. It also acts as a chaching name server for the local network. It was written for setups like yours. Once you have this all working, you will need to configure your firewall to allow trafic over the local ethernet, and restrict it over the modem connection. You also need to set up Internet connection sharing. MCC has a section to do this, or it can be set up manualy, but that is for another message... Mikkel -- Registered Linux User #16148 http://counter.li.org
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