At 08:08 AM 9/15/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Actually Joe, it can easily be setup to use the same nic for both the lan
and
>the cable modem, basically you gave the nic 2 names or aliases, one refers
to
>the cable modem connection and one to the network. Takes a little bit of
work
>to setup, but except for the fact that you only have one NIC, there is
really no
>difference.
Caveat: Not all cable modem systems are created the same. I'm going to make
some generalities that may or may not be true on any particular cable
system, with any particular cable modem. Ignore me if you know better than
I do.
Not quite true. Since you only have one NIC, and all traffic is on the
network connected to that NIC, all your traffic is visible to the
cablemodem! At the very least you've made all your internal traffic
theoretically visible to rest of the work. At the worst, you're soaking up
your cablemodem bandwidth by sending a lot of packets out that the
cablemodem doesn't need to see. This isn't too bad for the rest of the
world as long as your internal network is using one of the reserved,
non-routing IP address spaces - the packets will get dropped pretty
quickly. If you've been silly, however, and used someone else's IP space,
you could soak up a good bit of bandwidth in between you and whoever's IP
space you've been appropriating.
Of course, by exposing your internal network to the cablemodem, you've
probably also rendered yourself vulnerable to a number of outside attacks.
Likely if you've got wintel boxes on that net, other cable modem users can
look through any non-passworded directories you have shared, or print to
your printers.
Basically, you aren't supposed to make your internal addresses visible to
the rest of the world. NE2000 cards are so cheap these days that I don't
really see too much excuse for not having a seperate NIC for the cablemodem.
Good luck!
Michael Kohne
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"Evolution is God's version of domino rally"
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