Okie, so our flatmate set up dsl at our place using his dsl modem and his firewall (we had a better dsl modem but he couldn't figure out how it worked so he reverted to his stuff)....

Anyhow,... his firewall died or started playing up, it looks like one of the network cards died or something.... so he attached it to our our firewall box, installed a new network card and tried to set up all the routing... it's been 4 days since that time and he still hasn't figured it out.... it's a real mess to be honest... he's not sure which card is what, what is pointing where or what he needs to do....

It looks like I know more about this stuff then he does,... I set up our orginal gateway which used a standard modem and it worked a charm for years... so anyway... I thought about taking over and sorting things out... but I have some questions...

1. I have 2 ethernet cards... one for the internal network and one pointing to the modem (the modem has a built in ethernet card). Do I need to set up a gateway on each card?

1.2 If I do what should they be? Should the external card have a gateway pointing to the modem and the internal one have a gateway pointing to the external card?

2. Routing. Looking at the route that are there it looking like there is a route for each card. Is this the way it should be?? There is a default route as well but I think I understand what that should be...

3. We are going to set up IP tables to do our firewall tasks. Basically we will be dropping anything that comes into the network that has not been iniated from within our network. This is what I did with our old modem. Is there anything I need to know about doing this with ethernet cards instead??

4. Does anyone know what I am talking about??

All useful replies will receive beer providing you turn up in Sydney to collect...

For roughly $60US you can pick up a nice Linksys router, pre-configured with DHCP and basic NAT firewall protection. How much time can you put into the project and stay cheaper than that ?!?!

-PatP

You need to purchase such a box ... it should work quite satisfactorily right out of the box ... and then you may need to inform your DSL/cable supplier of your new equipment.

Every piece of network hardware has a serial-number called a MAC address whose purpose is to uniquely identify the hardware. (Not "where it is on the network," which is its IP-address, but literally "what router, or network-card, or whatever, it is." The idea is that every single unit ever made will have a unique MAC.) Your provider uses the MAC address to recognize a new vs. an existing subscriber to their service.