Hello Crossfire, Thks for your message, you do justice to yr name, I might say.
Ia m using Thunderbird as my email client. As I said before, this was my first email to SLUG and I was not aware of the unforeseen consequences. By the way, no further HTML emails were sent by me.
I don't think that I missed expressing my sorries to everyone who blasted me off.
Well, at present I am using a Siemens SpeedStream 4200 ADSL modem supplied by Telstra as part of their broadband plan. Pinging the modem tells me that the PPPoA protocol is used. The modem has one USB and one Ethernet port. At present I use USB to connect to the Internet and the Ethernet port to enable Internet access to my second machine (XP Pro). By the way,I can switch both ports around, everything still works fine.
I am not an expert in Networking nor in most other computer matters, just a normal XP user who likes to learn and therefore 'ponders' into the Linux environment. I tried to read up the various protocols, also modifying conf files, but at this stage the networking part is one of the setup areas, I am not comfortable with. An other SLUG member is very kind and offered his direct help via GAIM, I am looking forward to this. So all things will hopefully happen in the next couple of days.
I had a lock at the link you referred to, sorry, my level of expertise in Linux in not sufficient to deal with this.
Regards, Bolero Crossfire wrote:
Bolero was once rumoured to have said: [massive snip] For a start, get yourself a mail client that does sensible things, like generate multipart/alternative w/ text/plain at the very least if you're going to insist on posting HTML mails. [Some of us are using text-only mail clients (such as mutt) and don't particular like having to deal with HTML]. Whatever you used did not do the polite thing and generate a text/plain part. Anyway, with the DSL issue... Please oh PLEASE do not try to use USB ADSL modems with linux. Its not recommended and I'm not even sure if its supported. However, most ethernet based ADSL modems will work with linux in Full bridge (terminated by PC) or routed (terminated by modem) modes. Once you have terminated the connection on your PC, its also a trivial matter to further share out that connection. Now, there is probably a roaring debate over routed modems vs using full bridge. It is my opinion that the people who argue that you use routed modems are only saying so becuase of the difference in difficulty. (ie: routed modems are easier to set up... but if they don't work right you can go through hell trying to work out why or get it fixed). If you have the ability to configure it, I would strongly advise using the full-bridge modes whenever possible and terminating directly on your PC. It removes the need for ugly dnat hacks. It removes the factor of crappy ADSL modem NAT/filtering. Router-modems generally introduce more problems than they are worth. Full-bridge also has the advantage that you can tell when the DSL is down or playing up (your PPP session will die - this is something that you can quite easily test for - as opposed to the other end of your route suddely vanishing, which is a pain to test for). You can also use Linux's often vastly superior NAT and firewalling. There are guides on how to configure the software side of full-bridge when dealing with services that use PPPoE. I wrote one of these guides some years ago[1]. I don't recommend using my PPPoE instructions as my guide used the slightly tempermental and fidgety kernel PPPoE. I suggest you read becsta's guide which uses Roaring Penguin PPPoE, which most Linux distros ship with these days. Then you should read the firewalling bit of my guide at the very least and instigate the basic ruleset I offer. Alternatively, you could research the relevant Netfilter documenation. C. [1] http://nekohako.xware.cx/tech/adsl-2.4.html
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