On Wed, 2002-03-20 at 20:22, Peter Rundle wrote: > Sluggers, > > Just need some advice and opinions on a little job I've been offered. > > Office has a Telstra Big pond cable connection to a Windoze 2K box > which acts as the gateway for a small network of Macs. Apparently the > cable connection falls over all the time along with the Doze box, also > there is *no* firewall protection at all on the Doze box. Suggestion is to > put in a Linux box to act as the gateway along with Iptables. > > Question 1. Is it possible to connect to Telstra Cable from Linux? I'm not > familiar with Telstra cable, I assume that there is some sort of cable > modem > that handles that side of it and I just get an ethernet connection? Nope? > harder than that, some sort of card has to go in the PC along with some > software? Heard something about a .exe that is used to initiate the modem, > is there an equivelent for Linux? Or is this just a monitoring toy? Also > what > about IP address? Is that a DHCP thing from Telstra?
It uses DHCP to get an IP, then some protocol for authentication. I
think there's some difficulty if they use a USB ethernet card (you need
to get a supported ethernet card).
You need the bpalogin package to do the authentication. I think that's
available somewhere under www.whirlpool.net.au.
I use it, it seems to work pretty well - I haven't had an outage (apart
from trees falling on the cable and the like) for some months.
> Any and all success and other stories appreciated
>
> Question 2. (actually network 101 revision question) Because the
> connection
> falls over all the time I'm considering putting a serial modem on the
> linux box
> and setting up the default route to the cable modem interface, with a lower
> priority route to the ppp connection (with demand dial option :-). Now
> if the
> cable modem doesn't respond to an outgoing packet will the Linux kernel /
> network layer automatically try to send it to the lower priority
> interface or do
> I have to monitor and manage the route table myself? (I believe it will
> but as
> I said network 101 revision material).
It will, but you will have difficulties when the cable goes down - the
packets coming back will not be able to find you, since that interface
no longer exists...
Stephen
--
Stephen Norris [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Farrow Norris Pty Ltd +61 417 243 239
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