On Friday 12 April 2002 10:52 am, Scott Raun wrote: > I've got a co-worker who's thinking about getting broadband from > attbi.com. > > Anyone currently have it that can answer some questions / render > opinions? > > She's going to want to have up to six PC's able to access the internet > simultaneously. She's pretty techie - has built her own PC's from > scratch - but is only current on various Windows versions and > products. Her Unix experience is four to six years old, and she was > using DGUX (Data General Aviion's) and a Sun SPARC running SunOS, then > converted to Solaris. > > So, what are the gotcha's for attbi.com? What does she want want to > order for services, and what additional hardware does she need to pick > up for her home network? She's not going to be interested in a Linux > firewall right now. I don't have any direct experience with attbi.com, but I can say that my experience with roadrunner has been generally positive, and that the Linux and Windows internet connection sharing seems to work quite well. Neither attbi nor roadrunner formally support multiple IPs from the same box (at the consumer level, that is); both are reputed to do so generally, but not invariably, and it's probably unwise to count on being able to get more than one IP address consistently. (I can consistently get two off of my box, and only inconsistently get three.) Which means NAT, of course, and some sort of sharing software/hardware. This gets easier all the time. If she's going to go the Windows route, though, she's either going to want to get a combination firewall/router (probably the best choice; there's quite a few available), or at the very least a second NIC card for the gateway machine, and run the Class C local addresses (does anybody use Class B?) for the local net, with the gateway machine at 192.168.0.1 on the second NIC card, as Windows connection sharing demands, and picking up the IP address on the other NIC via DHCP. As usual, the problem with the cable modem broadband stuff is security -- from my machine, it's perfectly possible to see all the traffic on the local network segment, which, alas, includes things like POP passwords.