[Gllug] ADSL recommendations

[Richard Cohen]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001 tet at accucard.com wrote:

>
> >First question - Is there anything about this plan that seems inherently
> >impossible (like BT have found a way to prevent a NAT firewall - God only
> >knows how)?
>
> No. Looks good, although I'd use OpenBSD rather than smoothwall, for the
> reasons I've outlined before.
>
> >Second question - Like most 486s this one is pre-PCI; I'm going to try to
> >get a 486/PCI motherboard at the Queensway market next weekend (out of
> >London this weekend) and add a PCI-USB card. Does this seem silly? Is anyone
> >aware of an ISA-USB card? Where else can I look for antique hardware
> >(486/PCI boards were never very common)?
>
> I was just about to ask why you'd want USB on a router/firewall, before
> it occurred to me that you've probably got the USB ADSL option...
>
> >IMHO this all looks ok. The 486 should be sufficient for the mediocre job
> >I'm asking of it (fairly basic NAT firewall) and even an ISA bus should be
> >able to handle the modest throughput of an ADSL link.
>
> I use a P75 for mine, which can easily handle ADSL traffic. I doubt your
> 486 will have any problems, either.

While it certainly doesn't tax the machine, I've noticed that the pppoa2
program takes enough CPU time to appear near the top in 'top', when I'm
stressing the link, and I have a Celeron-200 in that box.  A 486 may get a
little busy if you're doing other stuff on it at the same time as using it
as a router.

> The only thing that's noticably slow for me is when initiating an SSH
> connection from the outside world (only during initialisation -- once the
> session's established, I don't notice any slowdown). But with USB ADSL, I
> don't think that's even an option for you, as you'll have neither a static
> IP range or a DNS entry.

<Beep>
Wrong answer.
I have the USB ADSL, and I have a single static routed address, which has a
name both within *.fsnet.co.uk and *.vmlinuz.org.  It isn't all that common,
but it isn't really hard to do.  There is (I think) at least one ISP which
will give you a small routed netblock over the USB service...

> Tet

Cheers
Richard


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