Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] BL2 conneting via ADSL

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] BL2 conneting via ADSL
  • Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 09:56:50 -0500 (CDT)

On Thu, 12 May 2005, Constant Brouerius van Nidek wrote:

Well the package says Nat firewall.

NAT means "network address translation." It is needed because the modem/router gets an address on the internet from your provider, which it then shares with several machines on your "internal" network. You internal network uses its own set of addresses, usually in the 192.168.X.X range. The router uses NAT to translate between your local machines' addresses and the internet address the modem/router gets from the ISP. So, good to hear this device does firewalling.

IP Routing, DHPC, DNS, DMZ, NAT Firewall, Port forwarding, VPN Passthrough.

I think IP routing is just another way of saying NAT. DHCP is dynamic host configuration protocol. This is how the "hosts" (i.e., computers) on your network get assigned their internal address so they can talk to each other, to the router, and through the router to the wider internet. DNS = domain name service. This is essentially connecting numerical internet addresses with humanly understandable names: to make up an example, 202.45.231.34 might resolve to www.mydomain.com. The router can apparently keep a cache of name/numerical address associations. DMZ = demilitarized zone. You can use this to make a portion of your network--say, a dedicated machine that acts as an ftp server--open to the internet. It would be partially protected by the firewall, but with some protection removed. Like, port 21 (the ftp port) would be left open. And other machines on your network would likely be protected from that machine much like they are from machines outside your internal network. Port forwarding means you can forward a port on the router to a different port on some internal machine. For example, on my router/firewall I run an ssh server on port 443. I set this up so I could get around some firewalling at a friend's house whose ISP blocks all traffic except http (port 80) and https (port 443). I could then forward port 443 traffic from my router to port 22 (the standard ssh port) on a machine on my internal network if I wanted to login in there and use the shell to run programs. VPN = virtual private networking. This allows you to log into machines on your internal network securely from out on the wider internet. If you've heard of PCAnywhere (Windows software), it works something like that. I doubt you will want to tweak any of those features: probably you'll want to just leave them on their default settings.

What I like is that it automatically detects of a cable is straight or
cross-over. It seems to have a web based management but I surely are not able
to tell if that is perhaps the URL that was used by the technicians.

Sounds like a good guess. To test it, just enter that address into your browser of choice. You'll likely have to provide a user name and password to log into the router administration program. All information about the router's address and the username and password you need to give should be the in the documentation that came with it. If the user name and password are set to the defaults the manufacturer put on them (they always are, unless you've changed them), I strongly encourage you to change one or both of them soon to something difficult to guess.

James




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page