[ILUG] Home net work options and opnions.

[Philip Reynolds]

Jason Corcoran <jason.corcoran at activant.com> 32 lines of wisdom included:
> 
> At last broadband has hit Longford, uncapped service by the local cable 
> TV crowd (www.crossan.ie) and I have signed up.

I heard about that recently, good stuff! 

> I have an old 486 DX2 66 that I bought back in the day and I share a 
> house with four people looking to use the connection. I am better of 
> rolling my own firewall ( mandrake 9.2 with shore wall ) or using some 
> thing like smooth wall ?

On a 486 DX2, I'd go with rolling your own. If you're comfortable
using netfilter/iptables, then I would definately do that,
especially on such a low powered machine. If you're doing NAT across
the connection, you'll probably need all the processing power you
can get. That said, we had some embedded machines which were the
equivalent of a P300 that never broke a sweat for us.

Stateful filtering in the 2.4 kernel is definately a huge advantage.
If you can keep state, you don't really need to restrict outbound
connections at all.

It really depends on what experience you have, but personally from
the hardware you describe, I would definately try and DIY.

> The modem is a usb and ether net jobie ( Terayon Cable Modem (TJ 70x series)
> 
> One of the guys in the house wants to connect his x box for on line 
> gaming. Are there any special considerations that should be taken into 
> account when setting up the fire wall ??

Haven't got a clue about this, have you Googled? I'd imagine it'd be
fairly easy.

-- 
Philip Reynolds                      | RFC Networks Ltd.
philip.reynolds at rfc-networks.ie      | +353 (0)1 8832063
http://people.rfc-networks.ie/~phil/ | www.rfc-networks.ie
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