[sclug] isp

[Will Dickson]

James Wyper wrote:
> 
> 3. somewhere you'll have a program to configure your networking.  this
> may be linuxconf, may be something that SuSE have written themselves

YaST2. If you're running KDE it'll be on the menu (in the 
same place as the "start" menu would be if this was 
windohs); probably the same for GNOME (I don't use it 
myself). Failing that, you can run it from the text shell; 
for 7.x or before I'd recommend this over the graphical 
version, for 8.0 I wouldn't since they "upgraded" the text 
UI, for 8.2 they've more-or-less fixed it again so either 
text or graphics will do, and the functionality is the same 
in each case - take your pick.

> 4. whatever program you use, it should present you with a list of
> network interfaces on your system.  It's likely that you'll only have
> the one, called eth0 (if you have others, they'll be called eth1, eth2
> etc, and you'll need to employ a bit of trial and error to work out
> which one you have set up).  

The command "ifconfig" may be useful here, if you haven't 
met it already.

> 
> 7.  Find out whatever firewall application came with SuSE and follow
> whatever instructions you can find to configure it, just to be safe. 

This is important. SuSE tends to start quite a few services 
out of the box. I recommend getting to grips with the 
"runlevel editor" in YaST2 (if you're running a modern SuSE) 
which allows you to manage startup scripts easily. FWIW we 
get probed - mostly by worms, I imagine - every few minutes 
(bursting to one every few seconds). Granted a DHCP box may 
be less visible than ours with a static IP, and your s/w is 
less likely to be exploitable than a windows box would be, 
but even so...

Recent versions of SuSE provide "SuSEFirewall" which IIRC is 
a front-end to iptables; ie. it's a "personal firewall" when 
used on a workstation. I haven't used it myself - I have a 
separate box running Smoothwall to do that.

Personally, I'd look at resuscitating some ancient box and 
doing the same, if I was in your position and if this is at 
all practical. Then again, I'm paranoid :-)