network question - is this unusual?

Mikkel L. Ellertson mikkel at infinity-ltd.com
Fri Jun 5 00:02:49 UTC 2009


Gerhard Magnus wrote:
> I recently had to deal with my ISP about a connectivity problem that
> turned out to be on their end. (The tech referred to linux as lie-nux
> and insisted on doing everything in XP which I fortunately had
> dual-booted.) But in the process of working through this it was
> necessary for me to describe the way I'd set up my LAN here and he
> seemed incredulous. This wouldn't bother me except that I've gotten this
> reaction before from people in the outside world but never an
> explanation. So I'm asking: is there something weird about this
> structure? Is there some "better" or more standard setup?
> 
> The DSL modem Actiontec modem provided by Quest plugs into the phone
> jack. The Actiontec is an older model with only one ethernet plug. Since
> I have four boxes, two of which are dual booting Fedora and XP, I have
> an ethernet cable connecting the modem to the DSL plug of a Linksys
> router. I then have separate cables connecting the four outlets on the
> router to each of the four boxes. (I did all this cabling at a time
> before wireless routing was as available and cheap as it is today.)
> 
> Each of the six operating systems (4 linux and 2 XP) has a static IP
> address and each has a firewall. I have NFS running on the linux
> systems. There's another firewall on the router, which is currently
> port-forwarding only ssh and torrent data from the outside world.
> 
> I thought I'd check this out before going further....
> 
Unusual was my first DSL setup, many years ago. My ISP even let you
run servers and provided DNS service if you had your own domain
name. I had a P-75 running as a combination of firewall, web server,
and relaying mail server. It also did NAT.

I would not consider such a setup secure now days, but the risk at
the time was acceptable.

Mike
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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