[SC.LUG] more networking fun

[Cockroft, John]

Before we moved to Manchester, we lived in Standish and I also had a
cable modem connection (through Telewest but the modem was very
similar).  I solved the problem by having an old (very small) Pentium
200 PC with two LAN cards set up as a bridge-router (actually ran
Mandrake 9.0 on this although it was a bit of overkill but worked very
well).

+-------------+ Red +-----------+ Blue +----------------+
+-------+
| Cable Modem |-----| Router PC |------| 100 base T Hub |-------| PC #1
|
+-------------+ LAN +-----------+ LAN  |                |
+-------+ etc
                                       | Would be switch|
+-------+
                                       | these days :)  |-------| PC #2
|
                                       +----------------+
+-------+

Red LAN is your external 'dangerous' LAN and Blue LAN is your internal
'safe' LAN.

Router PC was set up as a DHCP server.  Red LAN card IP address was
auto-allocated via the cable modem.  Blue LAN card was a static IP
address (192.168.0.1 from memory to match default allocate from Windoze
as PC#2 was a Windoze box.  This is, of course, complete overkill these
days (although I did run Apache on the router as well).

My father-in-law and next-door neighbour to my father have NTL cable
modems a similar setup and I suggested that both of them got hold of
this widget:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=178493 

This is a broadband router complete with a 4 port switch (excluding the
port in from the cable modem).  It is also a wireless access point, DHCP
server and firewall.

+-------------+ Red +-----------------+      +-------+
| Cable Modem |-----| Cable Router    |------| PC #1 |
+-------------+ LAN | Contains 4 port |Blue  +-------+ etc
                    | switch + WLAN + |LAN   +-------+
                    | DHCP + Firewall |------| PC #2 |
                    +-----------------+      +-------+

So damned simple!  The router contains a tiny web server which hosts the
configuration web pages, the system is completely O/S agnostic.  You
tell the router to clone the MAC address of the LAN card that was
originally attached to the cable modem so you don't even have to tell
NTL that you have changed anything.  Once set up it just works!  It even
has a hardware firewall built in so that you don't *need* to run
firewalls on the individual PCs (although I still do this on my home LAN
'cos I'm paranoid!)

John Cockroft
Unisys Ltd
UK Banking
Enterprise Transformation Services

eMail (External): john.cockroft at gb.unisys.com
Office (Altrincham - External): +44 (0)161 385 5035
Office (Altrincham - Net2): 8 743 5035
Mobile (External): +44 (0)7808 392100
Mobile (Net2): 839 2100
THIS COMMUNICATION MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL AND/OR OTHERWISE PROPRIETARY
MATERIAL and is thus for use only by the intended recipient. If you
received this in error, please contact the sender and delete the e-mail
and its attachments from all computers.