Questions

[Sam Couter]

Patrick Cole <z at amused.net> wrote:
> The speed touch home will work on pretty much all ADSL providers in
> australia.  The only thing that really varies with adsl modems is the
> interface to the computer (USB, Ethernet, etc) and hence how they
> interpret or bridge(PPPoE) the ATM encapsulated PPP frames.  

.. which is the main reason I ask. If I sign up with a provider that
only provides USB ADSL modems, I'm screwed. If I can keep my ethernet
one from Telstra, I'm set.

> If you are interested it's actually possible to turn your ST Home into
> an ST Pro and have it do NAT, DHCP, DNS and firewalling -- handy and
> cheap (done it heaps of times). All you have to do is toggle a software
> register and viola.

This sounds like a cool idea. Just one problem - Alcatel's ADSL modems
have serious well-known vulnerabilities in them. It'd be foolish to rely
on them for firewalling until those vulnerabilities are corrected. They
can be broken from remote locations so badly that they need to be
returned to the manufacturer.

It'd be way cool otherwise.

> The ST Pro does ppp internally (PPP over ATM) so it's also a tad faster
> than bridging the ppp frames over ethernet.

And would free up my PPPoE linux box for other uses.
-- 
Sam "Eddie" Couter  |  mailto:scouter at bigpond.net.au
Debian Developer    |  mailto:eddie at debian.org
                    |  jabber:sam at jabber.topic.com.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/linux/attachments/20020606/4d242c1b/attachment.bin