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The Linux Letters

Linux supports software routing in a variety of ways. One is ShareTheNet,
a Windows program that generates a skeletal Linux system that you boot
from a floppy to run a pair of NICs. At the time of this writing (June,
1999), ShareTheNet did not support PCMCIA cards, so it wasn't
appropriate for my use.

Another Linux solution is the Linux Router Project (lrp), a collaboration
among Linux users to put all the resources necessary to use Linux as a
router operating system in one place.

Then, too, lots of people are just using the Red Hat, Debian, and Caldera
distributions with squid, a highly regarded router application.

There's a wealth of information below; here are some of the letters:

From: Mark Lehrer
Subject: proxy servers

Windows should not be put onto a network.

I use Linux for my proxy needs. Red Hat comes with a proxy server... just
uncomment one line and it is enabled.

It also connects nicely to cable modem networks. In my case, the homemade
Linux client works better than the Road Runner client, which requires me
to log in periodically; the Linux software automatically keeps the
connection alive.

You'll probably waste three days of your life installing Linux on a laptop
and making the pcmcia stuff work, though!

Mark

From: Lee Schumacher
Subject: Win95 a server os ?!?

Good god man, I can't get an NT machine to work with two modems,
you're insane to even consider using Win95 as a server. Installing NT on a
machine that lame is hopeless. Linux is your only hope here.

good luck,

OK, this is really a BSD letter....

From: Ken Bolingbroke
Subject: LAN proxy

I sympathize with your problems configuring a laptop with multiple NICs.
I've had enough problems getting my Toshiba working with just one.

However, getting a LAN proxy working with a cable modem wasn't too
difficult for me. I used an old '386 with 8MB RAM running FreeBSD as a
proxy for a network at my friend's home. I know you're thinking, A
'386!?!? But as you said, it's only slinging bits and there's no noticeable
difference in bandwidth between machines behind the '386 proxy or
connected directly. And on the plus side, running NATd makes the proxy
transparent to the internal machines (Macs and PC laptops), running 'ipfw'
gives some security by filtering unwanted packets, and DHCPd lets me
transparently plug in my laptop with no reconfiguration needed between my
home and work networks.

All the software is free, the hardware left over from days past. Granted, the
setup and configuration is non-trivial for the uninitiated, but in this case, it
works like a charm. Once set up and configured (~1 day for me), it doesn't
need a monitor, just stuff it back under the desk with the cable modem and
forget about it.

I don't know if FreeBSD would install on your Toshiba laptop, let alone
resolve your NIC woes, but if you have a spare desktop, '386 or better, it
could work wonders as your cable modem gateway.

Ken Bolingbroke ken@bolingbroke.com

Bill:

Right idea, wrong hardware with the portable and the PCMCIA. This
would be a slam dunk for you on a regular PC.

Good Proxy servers for Windows 98/98/NT http://www.tinysoftware.com/
http://www2.winproxy.com/ http://www.wingate.com/

Otherwise, if you have an old 386 or 486 computer and a pair of old 16 bit
NICS collecting dust somewhere, you can do what I did. Give Linux Router
Project whirl. The whole thing boots and runs from a single floppy
diskette. Simply amazing! You can tuck it away in a corner running silently
without a monitor and Telnet into it for any management changes. Actually
though, it just works, I never have to touch it.

http://www.linuxrouter.org/
http://lrp.rutgers.edu/docs/beta/LRP-CableModem-HowTo.txt

Regards, Pingel

From: jstevens@samoyed.itc.nrcs.usda.gov Subject:
Linux+FireWall+Masquerade: Might be what you need

Mr. Machrone:

I, too, have a home network, and multiple users. Unlike you, I only have a
single point of contact to the internet (a modem).

I share that link across my three machines by putting the modem in my
Linux server, turning on IPV4 packet forwarding, setting up a
firewall+masquerade facility on the Linux server, then setting up the other
machines to use the Linux box as their gateway.

This, combined with a dial-on-demand PPP setup on the Linux server,
allow everybody else in the house (most of whom are barely computer
literate) to access the internet by simply starting a browser, selecting a
bookmark, and waiting for 30 to ninety seconds for their page to come up
(admittedly, many times the browser will throw a dialog box up
complaining about "no route", "cannot resolve", etc., and the operation has
to be retried to succeed . . . timeouts, you know).

If you would like some instructions on how to set something like this up,
send me some email. I know a number of people using cable modems with
Linux.

Such capabilities are also available on NT, albeit using third party software
that is somewhat expensive.

Luck, John S.

Dear Bill,

Actually, you might be better off with Linux. SuSE6.1 supports PCMCIA
out of the box. I have a Dell Inspiron 7k running Linux. It is networked to
my home LAN via TCP/IP via a 3com PCMCIA card and it also has a Psion
PCMCIA card which works simultaneously. I also have an old Hitachi
MMX 166 running Linux - no problem.

While I cannot guarantee you will be able to setup two PCMCIA network
cards, I think it is a better shot than with Win95; and the Linux footprint is
much smaller. No CAB files. The RPM install/remove is a piece of cake. If
I had a second network card I would see what happens. If you do
experiment with Linux, please let us know in your column, and if you need
any help, I will provide any assistance I can. I have been using Linux since
1992 and before that, Mark Williams' Coherent OS.

I read your column with interest every week and have always found them
interesting and useful - as with this one.

Very truly yours, gerry
http://graycells.com
http://lindenhurst.com
http://classicalpiano.com

From: "A.S. Baum, Inc." Subject: RE: Your May
24th PC Week Column: Up Periscope

Dear Mr. Machrone,

Read your Up Periscope column and new I needed to respond.

This is the first time I'm responding to anyone at PCWeek or for that
matter to any columnist. I really enjoy reading your columns. I see things
very much the way you do and felt you deserve this letter. The rock band
of the 70's led way to a family, wife, three kids, dog and cat in the suburbs
of Chicago. Been a self-employed computer consultant since �84. And
spend lots of time tinkering with older systems for the kids and home/office
use.

So, got the cable modem, after reading one of your columns, the same week
Mediaone began offering it in Oak Park, Illinois last spring. And everyone
in the house wanted on the net after seeing the speed.

Have a small network in the home-office. Mixed Win95, Win98, Win3.1,
and Netware 3.11 server.

Looking for a gateway on zdnet.com and stumbled onto
www.sharethenet.com.

The best part about this Linux gateway is it runs on a 386 or better, 8MB
ram and diskette drive. No hard drive is needed. You can pick up an IBM
486SLC 16MB Ram and Hard drive from Egghead.com for under $199.00
new. But I'm sure you have a beater like this collecting dust. Sell off the
retired Toshiba. And if you want quiet, open the 386 box, leave the cover
off and clip out the fan. It won't get that hot.

For the Cable modem you need to add 2 nics. And 16 bit nics cost about
$19.00 each.

It supports ISDN and 56K as well. Only one channel. But hey setup two
gateways. One for the ISDN and the other for cable. Just use DHCP and
DNS on one.

You configure the program on a Win95 machine, key in the basics and it
makes a Linux bootable diskette. Pop it into the 386 box, boot and you're
all on the net. 24x7 non-stop, fast, fantastic. And it all sets up in under 30
minutes. All for $70.00. Free Demo at the site (runs for 30 minutes and
you need to reboot unless you buy in)

Compare this to the a Webramp at over $400.00 without the modems!

The only problem I had was upgrading to their new 2.1 version. Read in
the 2.01 file and resaved the same info as 2.1. Had problems connecting to
MediaOne. Switched back to 2.01 and been smooth sailing since.

All in all. This is one of the few simple things to come along. The Wintel
world has clouded so much lately. I make my living off the complexity of
their world. It's nice to see simplicity go a long way. This has spurred my
interest in Linux. Being a DOS man for years with command line
experience, this stuff doesn't scare me like the GUI based younger crowd.
I've picked up Caldera Linux at Chicago and looking forward to setting it
up and I'm sure putting in lots of time to learn a new language. But isn't
that where the fun is?

Keep up the writing. I'm a fan.

Sincerely, Arnie Rothenbaum President, A.S. Baum, Inc.
arnie@rothenbaum.com

From: Daniel Chin Subject: re: Complications of
Simplicity (5/24/99)

I read your column about your (mis)adventures setting up a proxy at home.
Using a notebook as a fulltime proxy is a good idea, in terms of the power
draw and noise level. however, I'm surprised that you would attempt to set
up a server using win9x. I'd imagine (and you demonstrated) that it'd be
more difficult than necessary, and a lot less stable.

I'm sure you already considered NT, and maybe even Linux. But as i read
your column, my mind screamed at me LINUX! :)

point by point: - 90MHz Pentium? that's plenty for Linux, especially for a
very small server, not running X. - Disk space? With a mere 150 megs of
space, or less, you could have a very functional proxy. - Drivers and such?
compile support into the kernel for the NICs and the proxy server, and
you'd be basically set. - "Every tiny change in the network configuration
typically required a reboot." I've dealt with this the past week, while I set
up several NT workstations. Change the IP, reboot. Disable a binding,
reboot. Change computer name, reboot. Linux (and Unix for that matter),
does not require so many reboots, having many changes effective on the fly.

Just a little advocating, not so much for an OS as using the correct tool for
the job, while still staying economical. :)

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wrote in, saying the same exact thing,
but just in case I am alone, someone needed to write.

- Dan Chin --

From: Ralph_Goers@candle.com Subject: Home networking

You're not going to like my solution to your problem.

I have an old Gateway 486 EISA (with an upgraded processor) and 32MB
with a permanent dial-up connectoin to my employer, an ethernet card to a
DSL router and another ethernet card to access my home LAN (7
computers in all). I have each of the computers configured using private ip
addresses and my gateway is set up for IP masquerading. The server also
has anonymous ftp and firewalling set up.

This setup works perfectly and NEVER needs rebooting. By now you know
I'm not running Windows, but RedHat Linux 5.2.

Windows is pathetic as a gateway.

From: Louis-David Mitterrand Subject: networking
problems > Of course, it didn't help that I had to give the laptop the same >
machine name as the desktop, so that both would function with > the
cable-modem provider: They couldn't coexist on the LAN > without
changing the name of one and rebooting yet another time. > > Three days
so far, and nothing to show for it. Down periscope.

This is a job for Linux (which runs fine on Toshiba). I am writing this
from a Port�g� 7020.

- Install Debian (my favorite) or RedHat. - Make sure your LAN uses
private addresses (eg: 192.168.x.x) - Install the ip-masquerading module
included in your Linux distro. - Optionally: install squid from you Linux
distro, (state-of-the-art cache/proxy). - Surf, videoconference, telnet,
quake2, ftp, irc from any host on the LAN.

Let me know if you need more info.

-- Louis-David Mitterrand - mito@aparima.com - http://www.aparima.com

From: John Paulson Subject: Using a Toshiba 910
as a proxy server

... I'm sure I'm one of the multitudes who's going to mention how they
installed Linux on a laptop and use that as a proxy server...

In my case, it was a 25mhz 486 w/ 8mb ram and 200mb hard drive, a real
old Toshiba. I installed RH5.1 (with some difficulty as that laptop has no
cd-rom drive, but I'm knowledgeable in this). My friend's been using it
with IP-masquerading (no proxy server needed) attached to an ADSL line
since February. It just hums along (well, since the drive doesn't turn on, no
humming...) with just one unknown reboot. It has two PCMCIA Ethernet
cards, which required writing a script (to make one go to the ADSL modem
and the other to the internal network). If you want, I can send you the
scripts I used to distinguish which PCMCIA slot is connected to which
network.

Good luck with your install under Windows. Also remember that if you use
WinGate, there are many exploits which attack WinGate. My friend's laptop
is fairly secure as I've turned off most of the inet services (just leaving SSH
so that I can do remote sysadmin if needed). I also ran "satan" against it to
make sure that the common holes used by script-kiddies aren't there.

From: Guy Garnett Subject: Simply Complicated

Hello Bill,

I read your column, "A Harsh Lesson in the Complications of Simplicity"
with interest, because I have a nearly-identical configuration here at my
home. The main difference is that I don't have an ISDN line (in my case, it
was cablemodem _or_ ISDN, instead of both).

In my case, however, I had a proxy server up and running at the end of
three days. There are a few significant differences between what you did
and my situation, though.

First of all, the machines I have scattered around here are all desktops or
minitowers. I've found that laptops, in general, perform poorly in tasks for
which they weren't designed - although I do have a 486sx laptop that I use
as a portable "dumb terminal".

My initial thought - to find an old, slow Windows 95 system and set it up as
a proxy - I promptly rejected. Windows 95 has never been terribly stable at
best, and in addition, I've had no experience that suggests that multiple
Ethernet cards will work at all well under 95. Given the trouble I'd had
configuring one machine for both dial-up and Ethernet networking, I
decided to give Windows 95 a miss.

NT is simply too expensive to consider for a home LAN (particularly since
I suspect that I'd need NT Server to do the job right), though this (or
buying a piece of dedicated hardware) would be the solution I'd have picked
at work.

Rather than experiment with Windows 98, I decided to give Linux a try (it
doesn't hurt that I have some experience with SunOS from 5-10 years ago).
I put two el-cheapo NE-2000 PCI clones in an old Pentium system that was
gathering dust, and started in following Red Hat's installation guide. Other
than a balky CD-ROM drive (due to age), I had no real trouble. If you read
the instructions, the Red Hat installation isn't any harder than any other
NOS. That was the first evening.

The second evening, I spent figuring out how to get the cablemodem
working. I found the Linux Cablemodem-HOWTO on-line, and was
referred to a few other documents along the way. I was up late that night
figuring out configuration files and options, but it was mostly just detective
work in the documentation. It also helped that the cablemodem's support
people didn't hang up or run screaming into the night when I mentioned
"Linux". The tricks were that I didn't have to do anything for the Ethernet,
and set up the dial-out modem just like a link to a "normal" ISP. The thing I
had the hardest time figuring out was where to stash the machine names and
passwords.

The third evening was figuring out how to set up the "firewall" with
proxying and IP masquerade. This wasn't very hard, actually: I just
followed the instructions in the IP Masquerade HOWTO, and I was done in
under an hour (most of which was spent reading the masquerade and
firewall HOWTO documents). I spent the rest of the evening fiddling with
options - the "squid" caching proxy server for HTTP requests, setting up a
DNS cache, and configuring it all to automatically come back up and
re-establish the link whenever the phone line hung up or the system was
rebooted.

Other than power outages, the thing been up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
in the ensuing 6 months. After fiddling with this thing, I can see why Linux
attracts such a following - it works. I'm in the process of building myself a
gutsier machine so that I can play with the new version of Linux and its
GUI.

Guy Garnett

Vice-President, Server and Network Systems ggarnett@qrc.com Quantum
Research Corporation

From: James Fogg Subject: Simple solution
PostedDate: 05/26/99 11:00:19 AM SendTo: Bill Machrone

In your search for a simple router/proxy you overlooked one big problem.
Windows is no NOS. Nor is it simple.

Try Linux. Ok, so it isn't simple either, until you understand the ways of
Unix. With a little understanding it becomes very simple.

At my home/office I use an old 486/2X66 with 16 meg of RAM and an 850
meg IDE drive. This one machine, running RedHat Linux 5.2, performs the
following:

WindowsNT type server. Available to any Windows machine and shares
folders with snappy performance.

WindowsNT type domain controller/master browser. Everybody logs into
the server and can access approved resources.

WindowsNT type print server.

DHCP server. Everybody is dynamic, and learns of subnets, gateways, etc.

Dial-On-Demand router to the Internet via ISDN. My "simple" Internet
account (with dynamic IP assignment) is accessed via PPP, assigned an IP
address, and routes to the Ethernet NIC (you could use dual NICs instead).
Linux also performs NAT to allow my internal private IP addresses to be
translated to the assigned IP address on the PPP/ISDN interface.

I admit it can take 8 hours to configure all this the first time. The benefit is
that is works without exception, and is far more stable than Windows 9X or
NT could ever hope to be.

From: Greg Barbu Subject: Commment on
Complications of Simplicity

Bill,

Like you I wanted to share a cable modem across a network at home. I too
sought a simple solution.

Though an internet article on cable modem sharing at
www.timhiggins.com/ppd/sharing.htm I discovered ShareTheNet -
www.sharethenet.com . I was able to use an old 486 (that had a dead disk
controller no less), the ShareTheNet software and 2 spare NICs to share the
cable modem. ShareTheNet claims as little as 10 minutes for set-up. If you
have the right equipment and know what DHCP is, that's probably a
reasonable estimate. Mine took a day, with most of that caused by some
mis-information from my ISP. It's been up and running for a couple weeks
with no problems.

ShareTheNet is a Linux based secure gateway Cost is $70, but you can
download and try it out for free. All configuration is done on a win 95
machine and ShareTheNet produces a bootable diskette that can run on as
little as a 386. Knowledge of Linux is not required.

A drawback is that it supports a very limited number of NICs.

I highly recommend this solution, especially since it helps to recycle those
old PCs.

Greg Barbu

From: John Schilling Subject: Your "Up
Perisope" of 5/24/99.. PostedDate: 05/26/99 06:28:37 PM SendTo: Bill
Machrone

The only suitable comment:

Duh. (you should have known better)

There are about 10,000 ways you could have avoided your problem. (and I
will not bother with the obvious)

Having basically done what you have wanted to do--both for my family and
that of several co-workers--I've got it down to a rather trivial science.

[I've been the true M&S fanatic--I've made a stable proxy server function
under:

Win95c (WinGate 1.x & 2.x) [not recommended] NT4sp3 (WinGate 2.x and
3.0.1 & MS Proxy v.2) [both work fine--Wingate is the better solution,
version three is less stable but has a winsock redirection client] Linux
1.2.13, (IP Masq) -- great if you have an old 486Dx2-66, 16 MB RAM with
a couple of 3com 3c509's. [a use for the old 40 MB Quantum you can't
throw away] Linux 2.0.3x, (IP Masq & Squid) -- full function, nice
stability--