[techtalk] many home networking questions

Beverly Guillermo mezanin at home.com
Tue Apr 25 23:31:53 EST 2000


On Tue, 25 Apr 2000, JLG wrote:

<snip>
> 1. Do i need to set up samba just to get internet connectivity for the
> other machines? Some stuff I read gave me the impression I could just
> specify the machine will be a gateway in rc.conf, add entries to
> /etc/hosts and use 'route add' to get this working. (big, evil assignments 
> are preventing me from doing this gracefully for now)

No, you don't need Samba to have internet capabilities.  What you need to
setup is one linux computer as your gateway and setup IP masquerading.
There's a great How-To on this matter and there are details in it for an
@home setup.

> 2. are NAT and IPNAT the same thing? Which is better/newer/easier/more
> secure to deal with? It seems like most of the FreeBSD docs I am finding
> online are a  little dated. 

I think it's the same thing except IPNAT is for BSD based systems.  I
guess someone else can answer that question.

> 3. currently I am using 2 ISA nic's, will there be a noticeable
> performance difference if I switch to pci?

In my opinion, I never saw a difference in ISA versus PCI when it came to
modems and network cards.  What will make a difference in your network
connection is having a switch instead of a hub.  So you're not actually
sharing bandwidth through the hub and you avoid a lot of collision
problems with the packets being sent.   Also, having 10/100 Mbps
rather then just 10Mbps card is good.  However, since a lot of the cable
modem companies coming out are capping the bandwidth (or so I heard), you
can't really make use of it.  However, in a lan, passing a 10GB between
two computers on a 100Mbps card is really nice.  Of course, both pieces of
hardware are pricey but it's worth the extra money.

> 4. my nic cards come up in dmesg (and are detected as) ed1 and ed2,
> shouldn't this be ed0 and ed1? 


I think it may have to do with the kernel version.. of course, I don't
have edo0, ed1 or ed2 so I am no help to you on this question either.

Beverly







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