Cable/DSL

Now that we have talked about all the goodies you need to find to set up a home network, you need to decide what isp you are going to use to connect this pile of non-homogeneous collection of equipment to the internet. None of us could live without our internet fixes. Now, if you have very limited funds, or are still living at home, etc, you may be stuck with a dial up modem. BUT, if you are looking at a second phone line for your computers, then a dial up isp on top of that, you are looking in the $45 a month bill for the two, PLUS the cost of installing a second phone line which isn't cheap. In my opinion the best way to go is either cable modem or dsl. For under $50 a month, and most of them are waiving any setup fees, and some, like telocity don't even require an annual contract. If you can get either in your area, do it. Now there are always big debates about which is better, dsl or cable. If you can get both, go with whichever is the fastest and cheapest. Either is better than dialup!!!

Now with that said, what do you need to know to connect a linux box, or a freesco router to the internet using cable/dsl? First you need to know what the ip address scheme they are assigning you. Most isps give you a paper that has all the mac addresses, ip addresses, and subnet masks, and their dns server names and addresses, along with the name of the mail and new servers they provide. Do NOT lose this piece of paper. All of that information is what you need to give your linux box for it to find it's way onto the internet.

For this section I am going to talk about connecting a normal linux machine to the internet and not a freesco router. I will also assume you have your linux installed and running. Put your network card in the computer if it is not already there. Boot your machine and it should find the card. Now depending on the distro you are using, SuSE uses yast or yast2 to add new hardware, other distros use different utilities. Consult their websites to determine how to configure the driver for your system.

Now that the card is configured to be recognized, it needs to be assigned an address. Do this by either dhcp from another machine running dhcp across your cable/dsl modem, or if you have a static ip address use it. On most linux systems there is a neat utility called pump. I don't remember what pump stands for, but it will dynamically configure your network settings from a dhcp server. As root do pump -i eth0 . After a pause it should silently return you to the command prompt. This means it worked and your card is configured and the address is assigned. When in doubt about the correct configuration for connecting, and if your first tries don't succeed, then ask the nolug list for help.