[vox-tech] Peters Kernal Update and a Few Questions

[Jeff Newmiller]

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Roland Minden wrote:

> As it happens I do not have an internet connection anymore. I was on the
> AT&T Cable network and they were dropped by Excite@home. When I get a
> connection again I will begin to work on it then. I am looking at using my
> wife's connection to the internet using a router and a hub. I will need to
> wire up my home though, but that should not be do bad. Dorie (my wife) has
> Pac Bell ADSL.

> Any suggestions on a router?

A 486 or Pentium with 16M+ RAM, 2 NICs (3com or Netgear) and a floppy disk
drive.  CDROM or HD optional.  Dachstein (Linux Router Project variant) is
available on floppy, but the CD version is the newest and has all the
features you could want.

Most PacBell setups use PPPoE, not DHCP, but they do offer small-office
static IP 5 address networks.  Dachstein can handle both.

Documentation for Dachstein is still limited to discussions of its
predecessor, Eigerstein, but I can help you set it up if you get the
hardware in place.

The advantages of the off-the-shelf routers are ease-of-use, small size,
and low power consumption.  The drawbacks are lack of support for "new" or
"nonstandard" network protocols, and lack of control over firewall
behavior.  I have heard of some routers which have stopped functioning
after ISPs have upgraded their connection protocols (DHCP), though I
imagine that would be grounds for complaint to the router manufacturer.

> I am looking towards using a
> wireless connection as an alternative. I am however very concerned about
> security and lets face it WAP is not real security. Thanks for the advice.

I have not played with wireless networking, but WAP is a high-level XML
language like HTML that is used by PDAs, so I don't think it is related to
your setup.

The IEEE 802.1x standards do not address security (yet?), so if you are
concerned about security you probably don't want to use it.  An encryption
layer over all traffic would help things, but without standards a mixed-OS
configuration will be difficult to get working because the drivers would
need to agree on the security mechanisms.

Wire is still the way to go.

> BTW I was not able to download the Kernal before I lost connectivity :-( I
> will have to wait on that also.

... downloading kernal... um, wouldn't you download the patches, since you
almost certainly have a kernel source close to the version you
want?  Major savings in network bandwidth for everyone....

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