Hello, this is my first post here, I have been reading for a while and the information has helped me get this far but I'm a bit stuck/confused, now I need a bit of advice.

I have a PII 233 with 184 MB and 6 Gig HDD and connect to my ISP through a US robotics modem. I want to use this machine to connect 3 other windows PC's to the net, what is the best practise. I also want to use this excercise to learn about Linux networking, administration etc, so I'm not trying to do this in a quick dirty way.

I want to use the internet connection for browsing, email (I would like linux to get my email into a local inbox/mail box so that when I got home from work I could read my email on my windows PC without having to connect again) and gaming.

I like the idea of a cacheing proxy server and have read that using a DNS server can speed up surfing (not by much I would imagine) and possibly using DHCP to assign IP addresses to the PC on the network. I don't have a static ip address

I have managed to get things sort of working here are the areas that im having problems with:

Should I be using the diald command to control the dial-up connection or does/should squid do it.
I have been using diald but find it erratic i.e. not comming up or going down when I think it should, the only examples of diald conf and standard filters don't mention anything about proxies.
I think I may have problems with the DNS servers dialing up but when I look at the processes running squid has a dns server running as well.

Sorry for the long post but I thought it best to include as much info as possible

Thanks
Dave

Welcome to the forum

So lets get this straight - you have the LAN already but you now want to setup your Linux box to provide internet access for the rest or your machines right??

If this is the case then you're probably better off looking into IP Masquerading (NAT) as this will allow just about all internet traffic through, unlike a proxy where you will have to run applications that know how to use you proxy. I'm using NAT at home, as are most of the people I know which seems to work really really well. You can get a speed up by using a caching proxy, however you probably won't ever get enough identical hits in a short enough period to gain much from it.

You can run your own DNS but it won't make a massive difference to you, the use of DHCP or static IP address for your internal LAN is your choice, its won't make any difference to your external access. If I were you I would go for static internal addresses, its can simplify things greatly. Just make sure they are private address space!! For example 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x

And finally - diald - sounds like you have the problem I had - it dials at random when it recons something wants external access. If I were you I would install mserver which will give all your machines on the LAN (wether they are Windows or Mac or linux boxs) their own dial button that will fireup your dialup connection on the server, hence providing inet access.

Does all that make sense

cheers

Jamie...

Thanks Jamie

Just a few things then.

What, why where when would a proxy server be used?

Will ipmasq allow more than one machine to connect to the internet at the same time?

Is there a way to give certain machines more or less bandwidth, say someones playing an online game can I stop someone else starting a download, allowing browsing maybe ok.

Regards
Dave

If you want finer control over what may be accessed on the web then a proxy is the way to go as you can filter out specific sites by checking their URL. For example here at my university we filter out anything that might have a sexual slant on its URL, for example any URL with 'xxx' in it will not be retrieved by the proxy, instead a warning is returned to the user. Also if you have a large user base then a caching proxy can give you a massive performance increase. For example I read Userfriendly daily, so do a number of people in the office. The first person who reads the site uses up some external bandwidth getting the page(s) from Userfriendly's server(s), the next person who comes along actually gets a cached copy directly from the proxy, meaning that it didn't use any bandwidth on our link to the web - leaving it available for getting 'new' pages. That make sense?

Yeap! I've got about 4 machines at home that all run through an IPMasq server out onto the internet. I don't know what the limit is but I imagine its pretty huge. I would guess that the limit would be on the number of masqueraded connections rather than machaines themselves. You don't need to tell the Linux box how many machines its going to masquerade for, so any machine you want to get onto the web you just set its default gateway to the IPMasq box and your done

You can do bandwidth limiting with the 2.4 kernel, I've never tried myself - have a read of the advanced routing howto - http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Adv-Routing-HOWTO.html - its covered in there.

HTH

Jamie...

Thanks again Jamie.

Will go and play with this stuff and see where I get stuck next

Regards
Dave