82 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
82 lines
2.6 KiB
Plaintext
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This is a shortish rant about my experience building a Linux ADSL router
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for a Telstra Big Pond ADSL service, from a pile of old parts
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Equipment:
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One SMC 10baseT Elite Hub (12 ports)
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One Pentium-100 with 60Mb of RAM,
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1Gb of harddisk
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a cdrom,
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a SMC-ULTRA ISA NIC
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a 3Com 3c509 ISA NIC
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Various ethernet cables, power cords, etc.
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Originally I tried using Smoothwall Linux, and the green zone worked but I
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couldn't get it to talk to the DSL modem. Also, suggestions mentioned at
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Becsta.net concerning a stripped-down RedHat Linux 6.2 distro with added
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PPPoE didn't work for me either.
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On the suggestion of a Rent-a-Geek member, I dowloaded the 279 mb cdrom
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image
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smeserver-5.1.2.iso
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from
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ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/e-smith/e-smith-5.1.2/iso/smeserver-5.1.2.iso
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As root I used cdparanoia to burn this to a cdrom on another machine,
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since the Pentium100 box happened to have a cdrom in it and was able to
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boot from cdrom.
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<digression>
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However if neither of these conveniences apply and you're running an ftp
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server on the machine were the downloaded iso exists you can mount the
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iso image:
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mount -t iso9660 -o loop smeserver-5.1.2.iso /mnt/somewhere
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Then look in /mnt/somewhere for a file called bootnet.img ... when you
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find it, dd it to a floppy like so:
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dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0
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then boot the prospective router machine off this floppy. The floppy will
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enable the machine to find a PCI network card in the router if one exists,
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and you simply answer the questions concerning where the ftp server is and
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where on the ftp server the
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image is known to exist.
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</digression>
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I followed the install and it was very straightforward (remember that
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username is not
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username
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it is
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username@bigpond
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My only real problem was that, while there were kernel-loadable modules in
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the /lib/modules/<uname>/net directory for my ancient ISA NICs, I couldn't
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configure them through the normal install procedure which is built to
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handle PCI NICs but not ISA ones. So I used a text editor and modified
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modules.conf to contain:
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alias eth0 3c509
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options io=0x300 irq=10
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alias eth1 smc-ultra
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options io=0x290 irq=3
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I also found I had to set the immutable attribute bit on the
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/etc/modules.conf to prevent later stages of the configuration from
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messing it up.
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# chattr +i /etc/modules.conf
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Both my linux laptop and Dave's G4 Powerbook gleefully recieve
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dhcp-assigned numbers from the hub when they're plugged in and booted. The
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hub, naturally is plugged into the ethernet port *not* currently occupied
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by the link to the ADSL modem.
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<predator>
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