Re: howto for setting up an debian home network router

Kristian Lampen wrote:
Hi,
I want to prepare an PC as a DSL-firewall-router for a small home-network, five PC (some windows, some debian). I have not found a suitable HOWTO or tutorial for this task.
I use debian since five years, and know something about networking, but i would like to have the important things for building the DSL-router, in a compact form.

Is there someome who can help with finding information about this?

I use an old PC running Debian Testing as a router. Here is my setup:

Telephone Line -->DSL Modem(in bridge mode) --> RouterComp --> Switch

All my lan computers are connected to the switch.

So, here is what I did when I started all this (if you are new to networking in Linux, then it will need some reading to do if you want to learn new stuff):
1. First, I just connected the DSL modem's LAN cable to a computer running Linux to see how to connect to the internet. The computer had two NICs, but wasn't configured as a router.
2. Next, I did some NAT (or masquarading) HowTo's and configured the PC to do masquarading. No DHCP server yet. The second NIC's LAN cable was connected to the switch.
3. Next, I connected a desktop to the switch giving it a fixed IP adress on the LAN (192.168.0.0 network).

At this point, I had the stuff working. I had two LAN desktops and just gave them host names and put those IP addresses and names in each computer's /etc/host file. Worked quite properly.

That was a few years ago. Last year I installed dnsmasq on the RouterComp and put all the IP addresses and their host names in there. The network is working even better! Before I installed dnsmasq, I was getting a peak speak of around 4MBps (Bytes/sec) as opposed to the ideal speed of 12.5 MBps (100 mpbs). After installing dnsmasq, it jumped to around 9.5~10 MBps. Earlier, the speed was not even symmetric between hosts.

Finally, I installed a PCI wireless card in the RouterComp and set up a wireless network (separate from the wired LAN network) through the router and configured the wireless card in host mode. So now I have wired computers on 192.168.0.0 network and wireless computers on 192.168.5.0 network. World pretty nice.

To fine tune the things even more, I installed the Wondershaper script and solved the bandwidth clogging problem I was having recently (due to huge email attachments, bittorrent and other other downloads going on simultaneously while I was trying to work remotely using SSH).

If you need any specific help in any of the above steps, just mail here.

GL,
->HS






Thank you

Kristian




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