[Gllug] ADSL recommendations

[Jon Masters]

Hi,

[ excuse lack of suitable threading headers due to how this was sent ]

Richard Cottrill wrote:

> This is my inaugural posting to the GLLUG list so please excuse me if
> this seems a bit off-topic.

Nah, not OT. btw, hi :)

> I'm just getting hooked up to ADSL with BT and I'm planning to put
> together a smoothwall router/firewall for the link using an old
> 486DX2/66 that's kindly being given to me by a colleague.

Sounds good - except like others, I'd suggest just getting a pentium
motheboard with USB onboard - I hate USB but I suppose when it's the
bringer of mucho fasto internet access it's better than nothing :)

Has everyone seen that slashdot story about community 100Mbit fibre in
Sweden? It's enough to make you sick that we'll never get that here...

I had to wait a month after BT said mine would be up and running however
as of this week I do now *finally* (yay!) have ADSL in Reading with
http://www.mailbox.net.uk/ which is uberly cool. Just found out I
qualify for the discounted installation rate due to the delayed install
(they just started the offer) so it's not all bad :)

> 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)?

BT are fairly OK with things as I hear however they also don't guarantee
to keep your IP static or a number of other things, which when combined
with it being BT was enough for me not to use their service.

Richard said something about getting routed netblocks on USB ADSL - in
which case I'd really *love* to know who told him that because I was
turned down by every ISP I asked for that. It was hard enough to find
one (mailbox) who would do handy stuff like whatever reverse DNS I
wanted and generally have cool people working for them like Amber (a
really nice account manager) and James (who has now left technical).

Oh btw, Tet, you probably want to fix the DNS on your gateway if it's
only connections that are taking ages to go in - it's probably not able
to do reverse lookups correctly and so forth? at least, it's always been
DNS problems in my experience that just cause those symptoms unless your
box is really slow and unable to handle keys faster than a snail...but
that's quite unlikely if it's a pentium.

> 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?

Not particularly, but it's probably cheaper to get a pentium board. I
recently got given two old pentiums with CD drives, 64MB RAM and 3GB
HDDs free from a cool bloke on one of the mailing lists I'm on - which
was really cool and very useful for gateways... :)

> Is anyone aware of an ISA-USB card?

Not seen one AFAIK, doesn't mean you can't get them.

> 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. The
> problem for me will be getting a USB modem to work with a 486 (and
> accompanying bits).

Took me the best part of an afternoon to get the ADSL USB kit working
reliably, simulating power failures, dropped connections and so forth by
randomly pulling things out of sockets - this has to all run smoothly
while I'm in Nottingham (but I have emergency dialin access if needed).
The kernel (2.4.9) does randomly oops and occasionally panic but that's
why god (linus) gave us the "panic=" kernel command line argument (this
is when a certain someone says "but Solaris does that anyway"... :P).
Stuck a bunch of iptables stuff in place and put another router/firewall
box behind it at home and next weekend I'm going to install another box
to port forward services to, get xfs or similar running on apogee and
play with linux BIOS stuff to get the boot time low enough that no
connections will drop going through it if a panic causes a reboot again.

--jcm

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