OT: ADSL safe practices and setting up a home network
Guy Fraser
guy at incentre.net
Mon Apr 17 17:12:52 UTC 2006
On Thu, 2006-13-04 at 21:39 -0700, Richard England wrote:
> I'm looking into entering the 21st century and need some help finding
> out how to go about setting up an ADSL connection at my home. Can anyone
> give me some good novice references for what is required for a safe
> connection in the way of cable modems, routers, hardware firewalls, and
> how this is all connected?
>
> Any pointers gratefully accepted, and feel free to email me directly.
>
> Thank you,
>
As an ISP that has been providing different forms of ADSL for over
8 years, I have found the *best* setup is to use an ADSL modem
and a separate router. If you have lots of phones, an alarm
system or wireless phones, you may want to install a POTS splitter,
to separate the phone signals from the DSL signals on the phone line.
The reason I do not suggest an all in one ADSL router, is that
they are generally not a very good router, and sometimes do not
have as good a modem. As well if either the modem or the router
fails, you have to replace the whole thing and reprogram the
replacement router and I see more modem failures than router
failures. If the DSL technology changes, or you want to switch
to a cable modem, then you will still be able to use the same
router.
Personally I have a D-Link DGL-4300 at home. I wanted a DGL-4100
because I don't need the wireless, but I couldn't find any in
stock when my old router croaked. It is an awesome product for
a consumer level price, and has a 4 port Gigabit switch, which
makes Samba transfers amazingly fast since all my machines
have Gigabit Ethernet. It also has a lot of excellent
configuration options and features. I have no affiliation with
D-Link and am not "plugging" it, but am very pleased with
this product, and would definitely suggest it to anyone wanting
to set up a "future safe" home network.
Good luck, and happy hunting.
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