From: Steffen Higel (higels at domain tcd.ie)
Date: Wed 05 Jun 2002 - 11:45:12 IST
Derek Hardiman wrote:
> Can anyone suggest a good distro or a particular configuration to solve this
> problem. I have a couple of PCs in the house and an ISDN line. Currently the
> ISDN is connected to a W2K machine. I also have a laptop with 802.11b. What
> I'd like to do is take an old machine (Pentium 133, 32MB, 2GB disk) and use
> it as a gateway that will dial on demand via ISDN, provide DHCP to the other
Dial on demand ISDN can be achieved using the following script:
http://www.traverse.com.au/Australia/linux/scripts/dialisdn
You'll have to edit it a bit to get it right for your own needs. I use it
on a Debian machine with the isdnutils package. The script is run at start
up and the line is brought up and down as needed. You will also have to
specify that the default route onto the internet is over ippp0 (route add
default ippp0). There's a whole bunch of kernel config stuff which is
quite dependant on the type of ISDN TA you have.
DHCP is easy enough to set up, nothing particularly nasty there at all.
Under Debian, apt-get install dhcp installed it. It needed a bit of
tinkering to ensure that the same network cards always get the same IP
addresses. The manpage is well written.
> machines nad provide wireless access for the laptop. Firewalling would be
I know that most of the Lucent Wavelan cards are well supported. You'll
have to put it in Ad-hoc mode to talk to the card on your laptop or buy a
wireless hub.
> nice too. I'd also like the Linux box to act as a forwarding email server so
> that if I read email on the laptop I can still get at the same mail from my
> desktop. The laptop and desktop are both running Windows. There is one last
> machine that is running Linux and is being used as a J2EE server.
You could set up the server to fetch your mail every so often using
something like fetchmail, and then use IMAP to share out the mail folders to
the various clients on the network. I've never set up IMAP, though I seem to
remember people liking courier-imapd.
You seemed interested in a distribution that did all of this for you.
Smoothwall or FreeSCO might be able to do this sort of thing through a
couple of easy configu menus, but I've never used them.
hope that is of use,
Steffen
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