Hi all

We have a simple lan at home, with 3 win xp boxes.
I've been using linux lately, both on a now-defunct old p3, and now on my laptop.

I've been able to access the windows machines fine from the linux laptop.

That's fact 1.
Fact 2 is that we're on a 'primitive' 3 gig per month adsl scheme. So no huge downloads or totally free browsing is acceptable...

Now, last night we had used about 1.5 gig.
I used the internet a little, browsed a couple of pages, and downloaded a maximum of 6 Mb.

Then this morning, we check and apparently we downloaded and uploaded about 2 gig each last night!

Now, I didn't do anything of the sort!
The only thing I _did_ do, and I suspect that this is the answer, is to transfer a large amount of music files from my linux laptop to one of the windows xp machines. I did this via samba.

The LAN setup is this: the 3 xp machines each connect to the LAN with a static IP address each, and the ADSL router is connected to the LAN as another node, also with its own IP address.

Internet works fine from all machines (my laptop included).
Printing also works fine from my laptop.

Now, I suspect that somehow I've configured the laptop's NIC wrong.
I suspect that somehow when I use samba on my laptop, the transfer somehow goes via the router??? Can that be?

I am pretty stumped, and I'd appreciate any help. Thanks!
Also we've now exceeded our cap, less than halfway through the month, so we're going to have to buy more gigs to download from our ISP! This is inconvenient and expensive... (I'm writing this from work)

My laptop is a standard HP omnibook, running ubuntu 5.04.

- squido

Got a couple for you:

1) is your laptop wireless?

2) if it is, then is your DSL router also your Wireless AP?

If both of the above were true, then that could be your problem. If not, and your Laptop is on a wired network with your other machines, I might suggest that, in the event you could obtain an old PC, you look into using IPCop. It is a firewall that uses NAT. Also, You can shut it down and not have any physical access to your Router and thus the internet, yet maintain your LAN integrity.