On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 07:44:11PM -0500, William T Wilson scribbled...
> One thing I forgot to mention clearly in my other post is that you *do*
> need a box to proxy the traffic of the others on the Internet, regardless
> of whether you use a hub or a box-of-NIC's.
>
> If you have an analog modem, you haven't really got a choice; the system
> that has the modem in it does the proxying because you can't share
> that. But if you have DSL or Cable that looks like ethernet to your
> computer, you have two ways to do it: Either plug the DSL/Cable modem into
> the hub, or plug it into a computer and then use another NIC in that
> system to communicate with the internal network.
>
> Do it the second way. Otherwise, all your internal network traffic goes
> over your Internet connection. Not only is this bad for your privacy, it
> ties up the connection, which is likely to irritate your ISP. Especially
> if you have cable, doubly so if your cable company is one that tries to
> prevent you from sharing the connection among multiple systems.
The second way is a much better choice for a couple other reasons. It's much
more secure. The only box on my network that somebody can see is my gateway.
And it doesn't have an sensitive files or important data, so if some script
kiddie does manage to get me, it's not a big loss. This is doubly important if
you run non-secure OSs (windoze, MacOS below X), because the gateway acts as a
firewall for them. And the cable company (or DSL company) will usually charge
you $5-10 per month extra for each computer you have on the network. But with
an IP Masqerading firewall, you don't have to pay extra.
