I know where I want to go.....I just don't know how

[freebit50]

Hi Everyone,

I need a little help from someone to point me in the right direction.


I have a Netgear NAT/Firewall router that is connected to my cable modem. On the inside of the firewall I have 3 computers. One of the computers is a really old laptop (200Mhz/P1). I am going to be moving soon. I will have to get rid of the cable modem. I want to keep my home network. I have an old serial port external modem. I want to use the old laptop (it have Gentoo Stage 1 on it) to dial up the internet. The laptop also has a NIC card. I want to connect to the internet using the laptop, the router, the external serial 56K modem, and I want to share this internet connection among the computers in the household. I don't need any type of ftp, ssh, blah, blah server. All I need is port 80 http acces to the net. I know it will be really slow, but I dont care.

So, how do I do this?

For any responses in the form of RTFM, please point to the relevant manual.


Thanks,
Joe

[Clue-less]

Not sure if this is what you want about sharing dial-up: http://www.practicallynetworked.com/sharing/dialup/sharingdup.htm and Linux Networking.

I wanted to do the same thing with an office with dial-up and found this article.
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Clue-less

[JPMRaptor]

All of this was found at The Linux Documentation Project

I don't think your router will be of much use anymore. It probably can't connect over a modem so you'll need your laptop to do the modem connection. That leaves the only place for the router as between your laptop and the rest of your network. You can setup the laptop to be a NAT router just like your current router pretty easily (meaning there are lots of docs on how to do this). The hard part will probably be getting your laptop to do some sort of automatic dialing of the modem whenever you try to access something.

As for running it on a slow old laptop I use an old Pentium (yes original Pentium, no number afterwords) 133 Mhz as a router for my DSL network. It doesn't take much power.

Modem Sharing mini-HOWTO: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux-Modem-Sharing/index.html

Home network howto:

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Home-Network-mini-HOWTO.html
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[freebit50]

Thanks for the responses. Would I be correct in assuming that with the setup you guys are describing, my router would now be acting as a hub? Can I set up my router to act as a hub? Would my laptop be providing the dhcp service to the clients?

Well, I am off to read some docs now.


~Joe

[JPMRaptor]

The router would act just as a hub, if it works for you that way. You may have problems with that depending on how it works. It may grab the DHCP requests and respond saying that it's the default gateway and DNS for your clients. That's probably not what you want unless you have the router connect as a client to your laptop and have it act as the server for your other clients. That means you'll have 2 boxes doing NAT for you which is not a real problem unless you want to start poking holes in the setup to access your computers from the outside.
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