Hi u all!
I've an high bandwidth connection to the internet that I'd like to share with some of my neighbours that own a wireless card each.

As I'm a newbie in security issues like this one, I'd like to know what is the best solution for implementing a linux server that has the following capabilities:
- a firewalling service for protecting the internal machines of my LAN from the outside unwanted wireless users
- an authentication service for my neighbours
- some banwidth limiting facilities, to avoid someone to take the whole shared band

I was thinking of using iptables + transparent proxy to a squid server, but here the problems are 2:
- This way, peer to peer clients could have no way to download all the stuff they want
- I don't know what's the best authentication method to use in my case on squid

Maybe also the idea of a socks proxy could be useful, but I haven't found an opensource free product that I could use for this.

Thanx in advance for your help...
Regards,
Fulvio

There are actually a numbers of different ways to implement a shared network layout. You might want to check out NoCat (specifically NoCatAuth) which might be a little more geared towards what you want to setup (wireless authentication, bandwidth throttling). The NoCat documentation is well, pretty crappy so you might want to look for a good howto first. Here's a little more general info on NoCat:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wire...nocatauth.html

Nocat is exactly what I was looking for!!!
I'll try it immediately... it seems that there's also a growing community behind this project, and an active development.
Thanx a lot for the advice!
Fulvio

Some of the O'Reilly series of wireless books have pretty good info on NoCat if you can borrow one. As far as seeing it in action, I've come across a number of wireless portals that used NoCat and it seemed to do a pretty good job. Its community is definitely active and will only grow larger as 802.11 becomes more and more common. Good luck!