home network planning with all-linux questions

[Tim]

On Sat, 2007-11-17 at 01:31 -0600, Frank Cox wrote:
> In three months, you've paid for the router with what you didn't spend
> on the power bill, and after that you're keeping $17.50 in your pocket
> every month. $210 in your hand every year isn't bad....
> 
> Now... are you sure you can't afford a router? 

There's plenty of advantages in using a router (small, reliable, quick
to get going, easy to connect more than two devices to the one box,
etc.).  But I can see one common disadvantage - they're less
programmable than using a computer.  If you want special rules, you
might be out of luck.  If you want to create port-forwarding rules,
you've got limited options, and you may be only able to specify a few
ports to forward.  Mine lets me specify only 8, which isn't really
enough if you have to forward a few ports to one PC for some particular
protocol, then want to do the same for some other PCs.  Mine doesn't
even let me set UDP or TCP rules, it's just port numbers.

That's a Billion brand ADSL modem / four-port router, for those who'd
like to avoid such annoyances, though quite an old one (5102 series).

-- 
[tim at bigblack ~]$ uname -ipr
2.6.23.1-10.fc7 i686 i386

Using FC 4, 5, 6 & 7, plus CentOS 5.  Today, it's FC7.

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.