[Q] Newbie PPP dial up problem

Rasjid rasjidw at bigpond.com
Sun Oct 7 22:05:04 EST 2001


Donovan,

I would second the http://www.smoothwall.org suggestion.  It is always
better to have a separate machine between you and the rest of the
world.  You only need to an old 486 - the only requirement is that it
has a UART capable of doing the speed the modem requires.  (ie, really
old 486's may not, more `recent' ones will.)  I'm happy to burn a copy
of Smoothwall for anyone who lives in Canberra and can get to Dower or
Watson.  (Technically you don't need to burn the iso to install it
anyway - you can just mount it via loopback and install via http.)

For me, the main reasons I like Smoothwall are that it
a) probably does better security than anyting I'm likely to come up with
b) has a transparent web proxy
c) is extremely easy to use
d) does DNS (I previously had a script to take DNS up or down so that
Netscape didn't have a fit when the connection was down)
e) is a great example of a very polished open source application

If you really want to do IP chains yourself, I had a firewall script
that I got from CLUG a couple of years ago that I could forward to you. 
It did a fine job prior to my conversion to Smoothwall.  [ And many
thanks to whoever it was that sent it to me. ]

Rasjid.




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