[Coco] Hardware firewalls / Router - (was: Completely OT Question?)

[John E. Malmberg]

Jim Cox wrote:

> After I was done trying to help them, I began thinking, why hasn't 
> anyone come out with a firewall appliance for systems using modems?  

There used to be plenty of them, but the demand for the dialup feature 
just was not there, and it takes a few more minutes to configure them, 
which requires you to know what magic things your dialup ISP needs set.

And from discussions with my various ISPs tech support, probably all 
they know is customers are supposed to put in the CD from the ISP and 
type start, and they do not know the settings either, and they will not 
escalate your call to a senior tech for an unsupported configuration.

My guess is as the price wars hit the business, the serial port was 
dropped and it was not noticed.  In the course of a year, the low end 
cost of a hardware firewall dropped from $100.00 U.S. to $27.00 U.S. 
after rebates.


There is also a down side to "dial on demand" which is what that feature 
is called.

Since the firewall makes it look like a constant internet connection, 
applications will change from dialup mode to broadband mode.

You would be surprised at the amount of times that a residential PC 
thinks it needs to connect to something on the wild wild web just 
because you wanted to do something.  And all of this counts against your 
time quota.  E-mail programs will keep the phone line tied up.  Viruses, 
or spyware will also activate the connection.

Since the firewall makes it look like a constant internet connection, 
applications will change from dialup mode to broadband mode.

The ones I have seen need an external modem.

I have a hardware firewall with dial on demand from D-Link in the 
basement that the router portion broke, but it still works as a switch. 
  Never used the dialup port.

I looked at the dailup configuration, said that is way to complex to 
even try to set it up even to play with locally.


The HOW-TO collection in the LINUX distribution will pretty much walk 
you through building a dial on demand + firewall / router system.  And 
you used to be able to fit the whole thing on a write protected floppy disk.

All you need is a 25 Mhz PC with a ethernet port and a serial port/modem.

Think old laptop with 10 Mbit PCMCIA card and external modem.  The older 
LINUX I used did not understand how to put the laptop in suspend mode, 
and the function keys to turn the LCD off still worked.  I used two 
ethernet cards so I did not do the dial on demand.

So the whole thing took up a very small amount of space, and can be 
completely managed through TCP/IP.

Now to bring it back on topic, you can use a serial port on the LINUX 
system as a shell account with the COCO acting as a terminal, just like 
in the good old days when 2400 baud was thought to be the best speed you 
would ever get on dialup.

-John
wb8tyw at qsl.network
Personal Opinion Only