[LUGSB] Re: Home networking problem

[jbrandve]

> Yes router is indeed a solution, but I don't to spend $$ on a router.
> Is there no way to do this without a router?

Really, a router is the best way to go. You can hack something else
together if you really want, but the beauty of the router is that it
centralizes your home network around a common point for firewalling,
DHCP, and NAT, instead of relying on your ISP to do that for you.
Without it, you don't really have a network to speak of, and are
susceptible to the arbitrary will of your ISP's DHCP servers unless
you're very careful about how you configure your machines.

You could set up one of the machines to act as a router if it has more
than one network interface, using iptables under linux or internet
connection sharing under windows. I've never set up the former, and only
briefly used the latter as a quick hack once when I couldn't reach a
wall jack with my short ethernet cable. But this is more work and
requires one of the machines to be on when the other is. Plus you
probably don't have more than one interface on either machine anyway,
and it'd make much more sense to spend the money on a router than a PCI
NIC.

I highly recommend the Linksys WRT54GL with custom firmware. I run
Tomato on mine and it so far hasn't crashed on me. The web configuration
interface uses AJAX, provides all sorts of goodies like realtime
bandwidth usage graphs, and allows for advanced tweaking, though I
wouldn't recommend playing with settings if you don't know what they do.
It'll do DNS (using dnsmasq) for machines on the local network so you
don't have to edit a hosts file. You can even ssh into it directly. All
of this applies only once you've flashed over the default firmware.
Newegg lists this router at around $60.

Now this may be overpowered for your simple setup of just two machines,
but if you want a bit of flexibility and like to tinker with a
centralized network management device, I think it's a great option.
There are cheaper options out there, but I've had routers crap out on me
before so I don't know how long the various brands can be expected to
last. Unfortunately I haven't had my linksys long enough to guarantee
long term hardware reliability.

I wouldn't recommend a combined router/cablemodem. Since you already
have a cablemodem, it seems like a waste to spend any extra money
duplicating this functionality.


Update: I just read the mail where you say you do have a spare NIC. In
that case you should probably read up on iptables and see how to set up
ip forwarding and NAT. You'd want to run a dhcp server on the machine
with the extra NIC, but make sure you only serve requests on the local
port connected to the other machine, and not to your cable modem, or
your ISP may get upset.

That's all I can think to say at the moment.

Jon