[ale] ADSL

[Robbie Honerkamp]

I just got mail from a friend about his ADSL line. It answers
many of the questions I've seen here on the ALE list.

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  It's still great, and I'm better off than I was on Monday.
  
  Now, instead of having my Mac directly hooked up to the ADSL modem, I've
  got my nice little Linux box (P166, 40 megs RAM) running as a gateway. I
  notice absolutely no slowdown in network services at all, and it's only
  running 2 16-bit ISA Ethernet cards. It also uses practially no system
  resources on the Linux side. Really amazing. Let's see NT do that.
  
  Interesting side note: Bellsouth is attempting to keep you from changing
  machines around at your end of your ADSL connection by doing a very odd
  thing. When your service is installed, you have to provide them with the
  hardware address of your ethernet device. I suspected why; now I know
  for sure.
  
  Basically, their DHCP server will not respond if the device that's doing
  the DHCP hunt doesn't have the hardware address that you specified to
  them. So  when they say you get one machine on your end, they mean one
  machine.
  
  Also, don't mention that you're running Linux on your end. It will only
  cause problems, because it's unsupported. I told them I was running NT,
  and I knew how to set it up, and all they needed to do was change the
  hardware address in their database. They did, and it works fine.
  
  Next project: VPN (Virtual Private Network) via PPTP from my Linux box
  at work, through the firewall, to my Linux box at home. Once I can do
  that, I pretty much don't have to go to the office. Ever. If anyone has
  any experience with this kind of thing and/or wants to help out, let me
  know. I think I can get it running, but you never know.
  
  Happy ADSLing!

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Robbie