[Preston] broadband and LInux

[Andrew King]

Richard Bevis said:

>>What do people think of the various DSL routers out there at the
>>moment?  I've messed with a few (including Netgear and Belkin), and
>>they've all been a complete pain (or a nightmare even!) to set up, apart
>>from the one I got, which was the Zoom X3.  Can anyone else recommend
>>the Zoom X*s?
>>    
>>
>
>My D-Link DSL-504 was easy enough to set up, including PPP Unbundled mode (ie 
>no-nat). The web interface was flexible enough and pretty uncomplicated for 
>the easy stuff (not as obvious for the hard stuff, bt then if you need that 
>you should know what you are looking at) and underneath it had a fairly 
>decent text-only mode listening on a RS232 port.
>
>Beware though, the firewalls in these things are more or less one-way-NAT 
>only, anything more complex is beyond them. Behind mine I had a Linux 
>firewall box which took all 5 usable IPs and (past some firewall rules) 
>allocated 1 on the LAN (to my Linux workstation) 1 via NAT (for guests) and 
>some others for virtual services. The FW box itself was only addressable on 
>the LAN IP address range. You can do some rather funky things with iptables 
>and it's well worth playing with :D
>  
>
Looks it - and the syntax is fairly straight forward too.

At the moment I've got a Zoom X3 (with just one ethernet port) taking 
everything to a mini-itx server running openbsd, which in turn does the 
firewall and nat and everything, and runs a couple of services, so it's 
probably similar.

Could have put Debian on it, but I thought that since I knew sod all 
about OpenBSD, nor anyone else that uses it, and since it's a pain to 
set up, I'd go with that instead :)

Have got a few customers who aren't keen on spending £250-£300 on a 
Linux server though, so the router boxes have to do :(

Thanks for your help!

Andrew