[Nottingham] setting up firewall for broadband

[David Bottrill]

On Sun, 2002-10-13 at 00:25, Godfrey Nix wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Finally I am getting a broadband connection from NTL (next week). But I need 
> some advice on setting up a firewall. I have built a machine with ethernet 
> for my LAN, and USB for the broadband (that is what I am told is their 
> preferred connection). But I find my copy of SmoothWall 0.9.5LF from a 
> coverdisk does not support USB devices, unly a serial dial-up modem. That is 
> no use on broadband.
> 
> Is there some other Firewall I can use on the machine (486, 32Mb with 460Mb 
> disk) or can I get SmoothWall to work with USB? How do I configure the USB 
> for the cable modem?
> 
> TIA
> 
> Godfrey

I would recommend you use Ethernet not USB, I believe the modems NTL
supply these days have a choice of both. For a non-technical typical
windows user USB is probably the simplest, but for geeks Ethernet is by
far the most flexible.

Smoothwall should work just fine, I used it on my cable connection for a
while, but I went back to my Linksys router as it was quieter and
smaller, although I still miss the reporting and logging provided by
Smoothwall.

Configure the external Interface of Smoothwall for DHCP and off it will
go and get a lease from NTL. It's up to you if you want to use the DHCP
server built into Smoothwall to automatically configure your home PC(s).

David Bottrill