[CVALE] My next big step with Linux...

[Patrick Bennett]

Having gone through lots and lots of the off-the-shelf routers available 
in the sub-$150 range, I once again highly recommend you get the Buffalo 
WHR-G54S and re-flash it with the open source dd-wrt firmware.  This 
setup has been rock solid for me in many locations, almost always yields 
a better wireless signal and better overall performance, and has lots 
and lots of nifty features not found in standard manufacturer's firmware.

I have had particularly bad luck with linksys brand routers being buggy 
and needing contant reboots, and netgear brand routers being 
proprietary.  DLink brand routers I've always gotten decent and stable 
performance from, but their firmware doesn't have half the features of 
dd-wrt and is not compatible with it.

    -Patrick


Jason Roysdon wrote:
> NAT - Network Address Translation, but let's start with why you need it:
>
> I didn't give you all the details: The linksys will act as a DHCP server
> ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhcp ) and assign, by default, a private
> address (RFC1918 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1918.html ) in the
> 192.168.1.X range.  These addresses don't work on the internet, so you
> need to have them NAT'd.
>
> NAT (RFC1631 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1631.html ) takes an IP Address
> and Translates it into another address.  A one-to-one NAT would take a
> single IP address and NAT every single port to the exact port of the
> NAT'd IP.  Most cheap routers don't support this, but then you usually
> only have one public IP address for SOHO users.
>
> So that's the next point: since you only have one public (internet
> routable) IP address, but more than one PC, you need NAT.  PNAT, PAT or
> NAT overload as some routers call it, will allow you to take one public
> IP address and allow many private IPs to do Port (Network) Address
> Translation and share that same public IP address as far as the outside
> world sees your traffic origination (for the most part).
>
> PPPoE (RFC2516 http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2516.html ) is what most DSL
> providers (and some cable) require you to use so they can get
> authentication information before they allow you on their network.
> Usually you run it as some extra software on your PC.  With all modern
> routers, you can have the router do the PPPoE authentication and not run
> any software on your PC.
>
> As I was saying, you could have a home PC do DHCP, NAT, PPPoE, but it's
> rather hard to get each going, and these days with home routers to
> cheap, more hassle than it's worth.
>