[Sderby] Networking

[David Bottrill]

On Tue, 2003-05-27 at 11:59, David Coulson wrote:
> Hi to all, especially those networking guru's out there. Here is my=20
> query. I wish to network my wife's computer and my own and then switch=20
> to broadband. Neither of us wants to lose our email addresses and we=20
> wish to share the broadband line with two telephones (one upstairs and=20
> the other down), a fax/phone answering machine, and two computers=20
> obviously. We have a horrendous system of divided phone lines at the mo=
ment.
> One suggestion has been to set up a network with wireless cards plugged=
=20
> into our usb ports. Has anyone done this and would it meet our other=20
> requirements. Oh and we use two different ISP's for our current access=20
> on two separate modems. (The wife works from home you see and wishes to=
=20
> protect her interests).
> Any comments would be welcome and its got to work on Linux AND the othe=
r=20
> one (ME that is).

Hi Dave,

Firstly I assume you are going to get ADSL broadband?

This will work on one of your phone lines if you have more than one, if
you only have one line don't worry as ADSL doen't tie-up the line so you
can still make voice and fax calls. ADSL requires a filter to be
installed on each telephone / FAX you have plugged into the phone line
you are using for ADSL you usually get at least one filter plug / cable
supplied with the ADSL modem extras can usually be bought for around =A38=
.

As you will only get a single IP address from the ISP you chose you will
need a router or firewall to hide your two machines behind. The easiest
solution is to install Smoothwall www.smoothwall.org on an old PC and
use this as a firewall, however since you want to go wireless you can
pickup a combined router and wireless access point for about =A3150
depending on the unit, these can be purchased with an inbuilt ADSL
modem, so you just connect the router to one of your telephone lines and
then connect the PCs by wireless. A good place to look at is
www.adslguide.org.uk they have reviews on ADSL modems/routers. I speeced
up a wireless router for a non-technical friend a few months ago I think
it was bundled with a USB wireless adapter and cost about =A3150, setup
was so easy he managed to do it all on his own without even contating me
once. Have a look at www.dabs.com they usually have good prices on
wireless parts. You will need to do a bit of research on which Wireless
adapters are supported by Linux. For desktop PCs USB PCI adapters are
available, although some PCI cards are actually a laptop PCMCIA card
plugged into a PCI to PCMCIA adapter card. The Zoom Telephonics cards
are like this and I know they can be made to work on Linux as I have one
at home, I just have a problem at the moment in that my Wireless Access
point has just died. I have also had sucess with Netgear MA401 PCMCIA
wireless cards

Some newer access points use the 802.11g standard, although these are
backwards compatible with 802.11b cards, I'm not sure how well the
802.11g cards are currently supported by the Linux kernel. What I am
trying to say is 802.11b the slowest standard should work fine, 802.11a
should probably be avoided as this uses different frequencies and will
not connect to a 802.11g base station. So either look out for a 802.11g
base station, that will promise higher speed in the future once the
standard is supported by Linux, or just go with 802.11b which is well
supported. Either way as your ADSL line will only be 512Kbps then the
11Mbps speed of 802.11b is more than good enough.

You should bear in mind that Wireless is NOT secure, when base stations
are shipped they have a default SSID or network name, this should be
changed to something less obvious also you should enable WEP encryption,
this is however easily cracked in the basic 40bit mode and I'm not sure
if Linux supports 128 bit keys at the moment. For a home network the
above precautions are just about acceptable, as long as you remember
somebody could break your encryption code and hijack you bandwidth or
get at your PCs, a personal firewall on your PCs would negate the second
risk and since you will not be running a fileserver the risk is minimal.
As regards somebody hijacking your bandwidth the easiest way to stop
this would be to purchase a wireless router which can be configured only
to accept connections from only your wireless cards, this is done using
the unique hardware addresses of your cards.

Now comes the problem, some ISPs only let you connect the their POP mail
servers if you have dialled up to then as your ISP. So if you chose a
totally different ISP for ADSL then you may not be able to download you
email from your old ISPs servers. Some ISPs like freeserve suspend your
account if you don't dialup to them for more than 3 months with
freeserve you can refresh you account from their website from any ISP
connection.

Some ISPs give you the option to forward your email to another address
so you could setup pop email accounts with the ISP you choose for ADSL
and forward your existing email to the new POP service. Just bear in
mind you may have to periodically renew your old email account, I see
you are using freeserve you can actually connect to freeserve's pop
servers from elsewhere, you just need to use your new ISPs SMTP server
for your outgoing email.=20

--=20
David Bottrill <david@bottrill.org>