[Wolves] Some ADSL questions

[Matt Wright]

Hi,

We've had BT Openworld ADSL in for a year or so at my place. If you're 
thinking of using ADSL then you have two main options. Firstly, the 
freeserve/BTOW ADSL (my BTOW is on the Home 500 rate) usually come with 
Alcatel's Speedtouch USB ADSL modem. These are, nowadays, quite easy to 
set up, speedtouch.sourceforge.net is the best place to find drivers 
(these ones are userland) for the speedtouch. There are also some kernel 
mode drivers but they are [from experience] much harder to get working 
reliably.

If you do end up with one of those then they run a PPP link (using PPP 
over ATM) to the ISP and you can then use IPtables etc to serve the net 
to your network. This is the arrangement in my house and it works 
wonderfully. You can also serve websites from that machine (or if ur 
desperate DNAT it to another box)

Alternatively some providers let you buy your own boxes. You will 
probably find that if you use BTOW or Freeserve (or I think anyone that 
uses BT's backbone) that you will be forced to run PPPoATM. If this is 
the case then the modem will have to be able to do the NAT itself and 
you'll have to hope it can redirect incoming requests to your server. (I 
have never had experience on this bit so feel free to correct).

Hope this helps,

Matt

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