[Nottingham] Setting up a router at uni

[Martin]

Jim Moore wrote:
> Danny King wrote:
[---]
>> I think I'll look into finding/buying a little hardware router rather
>> than using a spare computer. Other students are what I'm worried

Lower power and quieter and smaller!

[---]
>> is NAT the only requirement I should be looking for?

You can get hardware firewall/routers/wireless-routers with lots of
features beyond only NAT.

[---]
> More sophisticated NAT routers can include AV, SPI (Stateful Packet 
> Inspection, which is the firmware's ability to determine the protocol 
> used, the source and destination IPs of each packet (thus be able to 
> hold open a port for that connection), and the default behaviour of 
[---]

I thought all recent hardware firewalls were stateful...

As a minimum, the spec should include support for DHCP & NAT, a DMZ
(port forwarding), and support for handling/firewalling the common
protocols. Other goodies commonly included are blacklisting by IP and/or
MAC addresses, and VPN support.

Most now offer a web-page interface. Check that other than only
Microsoft IE is supported! (Darn ActiveX silliness sometimes.)

Also, the first thing you should do is change the login user/password to
something obscure and that is NOT in any dictionary...

Some devices offer ssh or telnet login for commandline tweaks, as in:

> ... at least, that's the theory. Linksys WRT54GS 

If you're mentioning the WRT54G series, then you must also mention:

http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS6352077661.html


Have fun,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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