On Friday 12 April 2002 11:27 am, Scott Raun wrote: > On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 11:06:09AM -0500, Erik Hanson wrote: > > I have attbi and I like their service. They do have a "Home > > Networking" option that will allow you to get 3 total ip's for an > > extra $10 a month (not fixed IPs) but that does not sound like > > enough for her. > > How do they control that? How do they limit 3 DHCP IP's to a > household? The only way I can think of is to limit them by MAC. Yup. It's possible to configure the cable modem to allow only N IPs, and some ISPs set N as 1 by default. > > > If she does not want to build her own router, she will need to get > > one of the off the shelf solutions from linksys or netgear or > > whatever. > > Anyone care to pipe in with equipment recommendations? Presumably a > router with NAT & DHCP on one side, and capable of picking up a DHCP > IP address on the other? Yup. Lots of choices. > An internal firewall on the device would be > a plus. I've heard good things about -- and own, but have never installed -- the bottom-of-the-line LinkSys Cable/DSL router, which is about $100. The interface is web-based. That said, I've also heard good things about smoothwall -- including how easy the setup is, although I've also heard some complaints about the people running the project -- and she can probably get an old 486 box perfectly capable of running it for about $100. If she wants to play around with Linux, a minimal installation of pretty much any distro and pmfirewall (just to pick the example I'm most familiar with) would do just fine, too, and by using a virtual IP address on the gateway machine (Linux can run two IPs on the same NIC; Windows, I believe, can't), and the setup should be easy. (Famous last words, but I have install pmfirewall, and the text-only installation script is pretty straightforward.) Failing that, if she wants to go the Windows-only route, a 486+ Win98 (or later) box with two NICs, running Windows Internet Connection sharing -- and presumably running some firewall software -- should easily be able to keep up with a cable connection. The advantage to going with Windows on the gateway machine -- at least initially -- is the tech support. If there's a problem with the connection, the tech support people will be able to walk her through diagnosis and debugging on a Windows machine, but not on anything else.