Okay, I went ahead and paid the $70 for the software, which I consider very reasonable. Now I wonder if anyone can help me with a problem I am having.
 
Typical story: BellSouth comes out and installs my ADSL modem to the Ethernet card in my Windows 98 machine, informing me that Windows and Mac are the only supported platforms, and only for a single machine. They tell me that trying to use it on a LAN or any other operating system leaves me on my own. Okay, fair enough. As soon as they leave, I start trying to figure out how to set up a firewall using Linux. Not being all that Linux savvy, I quickly decide that a commercial solution is better than spending weeks trying to get it all figured out and never be certain how secure I have made it. So I found STN, and it sounds like just the ticket.
 
The problem is that I cannot get it to work with DHCP from the ISP. Before I pulled the plug on the Win98 machine, I recorded the winipcfg information: the gateway address, DNS, my assigned IP address, etc. STN works great as long as I hard-code all this into the setup, but as soon as I try to use DHCP (which my ISP DEFINITELY uses), I am lost in the water. Now, as long as BellSouth keeps my IP address the same, no real problem, but I have no doubt that they will change it eventually, as it is not a static address. Then I suppose I will have to unhook everything and hook it back into Win98 and move the NIC card from the firewall to the Windows box to get the new IP..what a hassle.
 
I followed some of the NG posts about the MAC address. Indeed, BellSouth does register the MAC address. Since my Win98 machine uses a PCI card, I could not simply move it to my 386 firewall box, so I notified BellSouth of the new MAC address. They changed it, but it still hasn't helped. Of course, they refuse to help me any further unless I am on the Windows box.
 
FYI, I am running STN on a 386 with 8 meg RAM, two D-Link DE-220P ISA 10BaseT cards, a floppy drive, a hard drive, sound card, CD-ROM, keyboard, monitor, and video card. I will probably remove everything but the net cards, floppy drive, and video card once I get it all going.
 
Can anyone help me?
 
Thanks,
Carl Nelson
 

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