[Coco] Hardware firewalls / Router -

[John Donaldson]

I bought a Linksys Router recently on sale for $50.00. It came with a 
$80.00 rebate. Regular price was $80.00. So not only was the router 
FREE, but I made $30.00

John Donaldson




John E. Malmberg wrote:

> 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
>
>