On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 06:37:18AM -0500, Maureen L. Thomas wrote:
> I was called by Verizon and offered DSL for 29.99 a month. Free modem
> and cable. All I have to do is supply the ethernet card.
> How easy is it to hook up for someone like myself who is still a
> relative newbie
>
> How hard is it to secure - I use Bastille for a firewall but don't have
> any of the other stuff I read about on the SLUG list. Can I turn my
> machine off on the two days that I work, and if I can will I have to
> reset anything to get it to work. I'm using Mandrake 9.0 on an AMD 850
> Duron.
>
> Is Verizon DSL any good. I had there dial up until they had so many
> people on one line that it became unusable. Any if all the answers are
> good what ethernet card would you recommend ?
>
I have Verizon DSL, and run a 486 based firewall in front of my home
network. For physical setup, you'll only need to plug the connector into
your NIC card. For software setup, you'll need to run a DHCP client of
some sort in order to obtain an internet IP address from Verizon.
They'll give you their nameservers, and you'll have to edit a file or
two. Really pretty simple. Security is more complex, and really should
be handled by having a separate firewall machine.
I should explain that last remark. Most Linux machine run email servers
(sendmail/exim/postfix) and webservers (apache) right on the box you're
using. It runs in the background and facilitates things like sending you
mail about things on the system ("cron ran, and everything looked
okay"). Now, one of the things a firewall does is block ports. If you
put your firewall on another machine over in the corner, then you can
block all the ports you want, and the machine on your desk will run as
usual. OTOH, if you run a firewall on your desktop machine, you make
things more complex. Your local webserver and email server both use
ports that they need to listen on. But obviously you don't want anyone
on the internet accessing those ports. So that means you have a craft
firewall rules on your local machine that will allow you to operate
normally while denying anyone else access. Firewall rules aren't that
much fun to set up anyway, and you've just made it a little less fun
than that. You _can_ run a firewall on your local machine, but it just
makes the setup a little more tedious and complex.
Paul
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