Here's a thought... I hadn't realized that you were using dial-up.
I ran a setup like I am about to describe for years prior to broadband
availability in my area and it worked well on dial-up.
First off, I am a big proponent of external hardware firewalls.
There are any number of specialized Linux distros available to handle
that task on a dedicated box, Mandriva has one that I haven't tried, and
my favorite is IP Cop (www.ipcop.org) which is free. These typically run
on old discarded machines. I've got mine running on a throw-away P1-133
with 32 megs of ram and a 1.2 GB hard drive. They'll even run on less
hardware though having PCI slots makes for easier NIC installation.
Setup is a snap and they don't need keyboards or monitors (except during
the install of the firewall distro, I borrowed one of the keyboards and
monitors from a local machine for this, though you can leave them both
attached in you have extras) being configured via a web browser on the
safe side of the network.
If you decide to go this route and need more advice let me know. It's a
breeze to get going, only about 1% as hard as installing Mandriva.
On the setup I used, I had one NIC to feed the home network in the
firewall machine, this fed into an 8-port network switch, and the rest
of the client networked machines also into that. This made a protected
high-speed network available to all of my machines. I had several
printers on a 3-port print server, also jacked into the switch. The
switch and print server are fairly cheap and bargains can be had on
these types of network devices. You don't need a switch/router for this,
though if you can get one cheaper than a separate stand-alone switch,
just don't use the WAN port and use the switch ports.
With the print server all of the printers are available all of the time,
no matter the OS, distro, or dual boot and re-boot situation. It made
experimentation and daily use really nice.
The dial-up connection is handled by the firewall machine, and can be
monitored and controlled by any of the machines on the network with any
OS. I used a USR external modem to a serial port on the firewall, and
though there are real internal modems available, I liked seeing the
modem's lights to see what was going on, and the price for internal vs.
external was the same.
One of the big advantages to using these external firewalls with dial-up
is that they have additional features over router type devices with
firewalls. Mine (external IP Cop firewall) still speeds access on my 3
Mbps broadband connection.
There is a caching DNS server to speed DNS lookups, a transparent
caching proxy to make page revisits lightning fast, this also helps when
updating multiple machines as you only have to suffer through the slow
download once, the rest of the machines get the file at full network
speed from the firewall's cache, intrusion detection capability, easy
port forwarding, static internal IP availability along with DHCP for
visiting guests, and separate interfaces can be set up for things like
DMZ web servers and interfaces with additional protection are available
for wireless access points. I had all of this going on dial-up a few
years ago, and it worked well. The caching DNS server and transparent
caching proxy made a *world* of difference in dial-up browsing look and
feel. And sharing the dial-up connection worked a lot better than you'd
think, lots due to the firewall's help.
Later on should broadband become available, you can add another NIC and
keep everything else the same.
If you're going to build up a home network, you might want to give this
a good long look. Do some dumpster diving and grab an old machine, then
go from there. I have next to nothing cash wise in my setup.
Just the not having to re-dial in and getting a busy when switching
machines or operating systems on multi-machine setups or dual-boot
machines makes the setup worthwhile.
Rick Kunath
Hi Rick
Not sure if you received my email few days ago. I'm looking seriously
at your suggestion. Someone guided me through the network setup using
static addresses (I think). This was on the IRC channel. The Internet
bit works but not printer.
Anyway - I can obtain a third computer, and am interested in looking at
your set up. I have an ethernet 8 port switch - think it's a switch.
Two PCs connected, with main box having modem connection.
I'm downloading the docs on ipcop at present, and will have a read, but
am a person who needs to do, as well as read. It seems like a foreign
language to me a lot of the time. For printing do I need to buy one of
the ports you mention? I have one printer, two boxes - a third if I set
up ipcop.
Thanks
Rosemary
Registered Linux User # 386597 http://counter.li.org
"A friend may well be a masterpiece of nature". Emerson
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