DSL firewall/router solutions?

Jason Stephenson jason at sigio.com
Mon Jul 14 21:36:59 EDT 2003


Since no one mentioned it, I'll tell you what I use for my SDSL 
router/firewall:

an old PC with 2 NICs and OpenBSD with ipf and ipnat. (I'm still running 
OpenBSD 2.7.)

If you have an old machine to spare, i'd definitely recommend going this 
route rather than getting a "broadband" router. My reason for saying 
this is that I have little or no experience with such.

 From your other postings on this list, Paul, you seem to know pretty 
much what you're doing, so I'd recommend you use iptables and ipfilter.

If you go with Verizon, you may have to also use PPPOE (PPP over 
ethernet). I'm not certain of this, because my wife uses Verizon DSL on 
her Mac downstairs and it has this keep-alive agent that it must run. 
Since it requires a password and all that jazz, i'm assuming that it's 
doing PPPOE.

In my experience, GNU/Linux or one of the BSDs installed on an old 
machine (Pentium class or better) makes an excellent router. I've used a 
P100 and now a 300 MHz K6 machine and both could push packets from one 
NIC to the other faster than my DSL connection could handle them.

As for the providers saying that they could give you DSL and then saying 
that they couldn't, I have no idea. I do know that one provider told me 
that they could give me DSL, but that it would be slow, and my current 
provider said that we could all the way to 1.5 Mbps and beyond. I'd say 
maybe somebody's database got a little messed up.

Cheers,
Jason




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