This is a shortish rant about my experience building a Linux ADSL router
for a Telstra Big Pond ADSL service, from a pile of old parts

Equipment: 
One SMC 10baseT Elite Hub (12 ports)
One Pentium-100 with 60Mb of RAM,
                     1Gb of harddisk    
                     a cdrom, 
                     a SMC-ULTRA ISA NIC 
                     a 3Com 3c509 ISA NIC
Various ethernet cables, power cords, etc.

Originally I tried using Smoothwall Linux, and the green zone worked but I
couldn't get it to talk to the DSL modem. Also, suggestions mentioned at
Becsta.net concerning a stripped-down RedHat Linux 6.2 distro with added
PPPoE didn't work for me either.

On the suggestion of a Rent-a-Geek member, I dowloaded the 279 mb cdrom
image  
smeserver-5.1.2.iso 
from 
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/e-smith/e-smith-5.1.2/iso/smeserver-5.1.2.iso 

As root I used cdparanoia to burn this to a cdrom on another machine,
since the Pentium100 box happened to have a cdrom in it and was able to
boot from cdrom.

<digression>
However if neither of these conveniences apply and you're running an ftp
server on the machine were the downloaded iso exists you can mount the
iso image:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop smeserver-5.1.2.iso /mnt/somewhere

Then look in /mnt/somewhere for a file called bootnet.img ... when you
find it, dd it to a floppy like so:

dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0

then boot the prospective router machine off this floppy. The floppy will
enable the machine to find a PCI network card in the router if one exists,
and you simply answer the questions concerning where the ftp server is and
where on the ftp server the
image is known to exist.
</digression>

I followed the install and it was very straightforward (remember that
username is not 

username

it is

username@bigpond

My only real problem was that, while there were kernel-loadable modules in
the /lib/modules/<uname>/net directory for my ancient ISA NICs, I couldn't
configure them through the normal install procedure which is built to
handle PCI NICs but not ISA ones. So I used a text editor and modified
modules.conf to contain:

alias eth0 3c509
options io=0x300 irq=10

alias eth1 smc-ultra
options io=0x290 irq=3


I also found I had to set the immutable attribute bit on the
/etc/modules.conf to prevent later stages of the configuration from
messing it up.

# chattr +i /etc/modules.conf

Both my linux laptop and Dave's G4 Powerbook gleefully recieve
dhcp-assigned numbers from the hub when they're plugged in and booted. The
hub, naturally is plugged into the ethernet port *not* currently occupied
by the link to the ADSL modem.


<predator>