I just finished setting up a BigPond connection for a small business in Sydney and found that the USB device is supported under Redhat 7.2, which you will need for the IPTables anywhy. You just have to load the driver for the usb network device (SMC something). But you do not have to use their networking card (or piece of crap hanging on the end of a usb cable). You can use a standard $20 Realtec PCI 10/100 networking card, which I reccomend above the USB device, as the usb cable itself is limited to 10Mpbs (which is not actually a prob because the cable connection is not that fast anywhy), and the PCI card auto configures better. Telstra also give you the option of a ISA card at install time, but I am not sure that would be a good option as not all computers have an ISA bus anymore either.
Once you have the card configured, set it to use DHCP, and you should be able to ping a mail server (I think). Once you get the bpalogin software (I used a bin rpm, and it worked first pop for me), you should be able to use the rest of the internet as well. There is good documentation with the software at http://bpalogin.sourceforge.net/. Just remember to turn on the IPTables in the rc.local file with a command like: iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward Depending of what you have the network cards configured as ofcorse Regards, and hope that helps a little. Karl Bowden > > > > > >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). > > > Hmm, ok who's they? I assume you mean the people I'm doing the job for. > I get to specify the box so it will have a PCI card (or cards as it's a > gateway for the rest of > the network so I'll need two). > > >You need the bpalogin package to do the authentication. I think that's > >available somewhere under www.whirlpool.net.au. > > > Thanks I'll have a squiz at that. > > >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... > > > > Sure, can't be helped but at least any new tcp/ip sessions will get a > response, so the user > will click a link and nothing will happen so they'll do what all good > users do which is try > again and 'volia' the site is there (though seems a bit slooowww) but > hey that happens > all the time, welcome to the internet. > > Cheers > > Pete > > > -- > SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ > More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug > -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
