network question - is this unusual?

[fred smith]

On Thu, Jun 04, 2009 at 04:01:51PM -0700, Gerhard Magnus wrote:
> I recently had to deal with my ISP about a connectivity problem that
> turned out to be on their end. (The tech referred to linux as lie-nux
> and insisted on doing everything in XP which I fortunately had
> dual-booted.) But in the process of working through this it was
> necessary for me to describe the way I'd set up my LAN here and he
> seemed incredulous. This wouldn't bother me except that I've gotten this
> reaction before from people in the outside world but never an
> explanation. So I'm asking: is there something weird about this
> structure? Is there some "better" or more standard setup?

I would think there's nothing unusual about this.

The tech is probably used to totally clueless people who just plug
their windoze box directly into the provided modem, rather than people
who have a home LAN.

I had a similar setup for years even when we still used dialup here for
our connectivity. A PC running Smoothwall, using PPP to connect to my
ISP and letting PPP auto-dial when it felt the need to go online.  Slow,
yes, but everything "just worked". Switching to cable was a no-brainer,
mostly: did a second Smoothwall installation on another crappy old PC,
(just in case I ever wanted to revert, so I wouldn't have blown away a
known-working configuration) configured it to use a 2nd ethernet card
for the WAN side in lieu of the modem and we were off to the races! (some
time later I got a cheap linksys router to use instead, primarily because
it uses about a tenth the power of the old PC.)

> 
> The DSL modem Actiontec modem provided by Quest plugs into the phone
> jack. The Actiontec is an older model with only one ethernet plug. Since
> I have four boxes, two of which are dual booting Fedora and XP, I have
> an ethernet cable connecting the modem to the DSL plug of a Linksys
> router. I then have separate cables connecting the four outlets on the
> router to each of the four boxes. (I did all this cabling at a time
> before wireless routing was as available and cheap as it is today.)
> 
> Each of the six operating systems (4 linux and 2 XP) has a static IP
> address and each has a firewall. I have NFS running on the linux
> systems. There's another firewall on the router, which is currently
> port-forwarding only ssh and torrent data from the outside world.
> 
> I thought I'd check this out before going further....
> 
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-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
  "And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father,
  Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government there will be no end. He 
 will reign on David's throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding
      it with justice and righteousness from that time on and forever."
------------------------------- Isaiah 9:7 (niv) ------------------------------
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