[Techtalk] Home Internet access on Linux

[John Clarke]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 06:39:11PM +0200, Dan Richter wrote:

> How easy is it to get Internet access at home with a Linux machine? I'm 
> most interested in ADSL, but using a modem might be a possibility.

I've been using Linux for Internet access at home (via a modem) for at
least eight years and it's not that difficult to set up.

Make sure your hardware is supported by Linux (and the distribution
you're planning to use) before you start.  Video, and sound are the
only things that have ever caused me grief.

If you use a modem, make sure it's not a winmodem.  I prefer external
modems - they're usually less trouble, you can see the blinkenlights,
and you can power-cycle them if they lock up :-)

If you're going with ADSL, I've heard that ADSL routers with an
ethernet interface are easier to get working that those with USB. I've
only setup ADSL once and that was via ethernet and a static IP address,
and it was very simple.

If you have an internal LAN, you'll need to either use two different
ethernet cards or use nameif to make sure that eth0 and eth1 come up on
the same card each time (otherwise it's dependent upon the order in
which the kernel initialises the cards, and that may change).  This
page explains how to do it:

    http://www.xenotime.net/linux/doc/network-interface-names.txt

Secure your system.  Setup strong firewalling, only run those network
services you really need and if you can ensure they only listen on
127.0.0.1 and your internal LAN address (if you have a home LAN) then
do so.  If you want remote access into your home machine, use ssh
rather than telnet.

Keep up to date with security patches.  Subscribe to your
distribution's security or update mailing list, if they have one, so
that you find out about updates as soon as they're available.

> I'm not interested in an option that requires recompiling the kernel.

Unless you have unusual hardware you probably won't need to.


Cheers,

John
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