[Cumbria] Christmas: a time of upheaval...

[Schwuk]

At least on my home lan... :-)

A tale I will probably retell at the upcoming meeting, but I thought I 
would note it down whilst waiting for a machine in install...

My darling wife has presented me with the gift of wireless networking 
this christmas, and after a slight hiccup (never trust PC World salesmen 
- another story, and her choice, not mine), I shall be receiving my 
shiny new 22Mbps Access Point and PC Card tomorrow (well today if I look 
  at the clock) and have taken the opportunity to rebuild my home lan to 
cater better for wireless access.

I currently have a dual boot workstation (XP and RH 8.0), a dual boot 
laptop (ditto and soon to be wireless'd), two redhat servers and a 
Window 2K server. The only internet access is via isdn from my 
workstation, so no access for the rest of my LAN.

As some will be aware, I like Red Hat, but am not averse to other 
distributions. Whilst Red Hat is my current 'flavour of the moment', I 
am not keen (from a personal point -of-view) on the subscribtion 
dependant 'Red Hat Network' (yes I know you get a free basic 
entitlement, but I have three boxes at home, one at  work and one that 
visits both - 5 * $60 for a what I consider a basic 'right' is not to my 
liking), so I have been looking for alternatives. Last week I tried to 
get to grips with Gentoo, which appeals to me, but it is dependant on a 
good 'net connection and any distro which _requires_ a kernel compile 
during install is not to user friendly to me. I still want to try it, 
but it's now on the back burner.  I am waiting to see what UnitedLinux 
do (if anything) and am concerned about Mandrake's constant need for 
cash, that only really leaves Debian and Slackware. I have long been a 
fan of the Knoppix 'demo' distribution, although it is not really a 
demo, it is a live working distribution that boots entirely from cd. It 
is also Debian based, and I have just discovered it can be installed to 
hard disk as well (I will have a copy of Knoppix with me at the next 
meeting if anyone wants a demo) so I have found a new 'flavour' to try...

So, I used the cd version of Knoppix to drag the data off my Win2K NTFS 
partitions onto some nice new ReiserFS ones, then installed it, and it 
worked flawlessly.

I am now in the process of working out ISDN routing using Knoppix on one 
of the 'spare' RH boxes, then I need to do some firewalling and NAT work 
using the tutorials I posted links to the other week, and then I should 
be ready for wireless... I will end up with a totally Linux (apart from 
dual boots) home lan which is not dependant on Red Hat or their whims, 
and a nice, shared, firewalled internet connection...

Ah, the install has finished - further updates as events warrant...

'Night...
-- 
Schwuk