[Nottingham] Broadband - where does the cable modem need to go?

[developr]

On Thursday 13 March 2003 15:21, D Luff wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm getting NTL broadband installed in about an hour or so
Plenty of time to get advice then!

> can it just go where the cable enters
> the house to leave me to wire it up with ethernet cable at my leisure? 
Correct, but this might just be at the foot of the stairs, so it may be 
worthwhile having your cable modem somewhere sensible, like next to your pc.

Tell the man that this is a temp location for your modem, and in a couple of 
weeks you'll be moving it to the furthest point in the house from where it is 
now.  He might just leave you a spare 50m of co-ax cable and connectors.

> I'd also be keen to know if there's any must-do's on the security front
> before leaving the connection on - I'm a Linux newbie and not entirely sure
> of how secure the box is/should be out-of-the-box.  (Libranet 2.0 -
> basically Debian Woody/Sarge with a nice installer).
You need a firewall.  Use iptables.  Plenty of howtos around - just takes a 
bit of getting used to.  

It's basicaly a list of rules you supply saying what network traffic you want 
to allow/block  inbound/outbound, which ports/interfaces etc.  

Place the rules in a script and have the script run at startup.
Make sure you log connection attempts, and then marvel at the number of tries 
against netbios ports!

Also, be ruthless with services you don't need running on your box.