Re: [sheflug] Help with broadband

[David Willington <david.willington [at] xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> They only gave me protocol PPPoA, encapsulation VC-MUX, VPI 0 and VCI 
> 38.  Do I need to get back to them for IP addresses?
Probably not. It's most likely that they give you an IP address using
DHCP, in other words you'll get one at random. However to get as far as
you have done I'm pretty sure you will have had (and put into the router
in the 'Basic settings' link) a username and password

> So have I got this straight, my PC connects to the router using one set 
> of information my router connects to my ISP with another set of 
> information? I can follow that, but I can't see that on the information 
> I'm looking at on the router set up page?
That's right. You have at least 2 IP addresses, one for the internet
side (provided by the ISP, probably using DHCP) and one for the LAN (ie
home network) side. If you have more than one PC plugged into the router
each will have an IP address. On the LAN side the router's IP address is
192.168.0.1 (unless you change it) and your PCs will be 192.168.0.2,
192.168.0.3 etc. They normally get their IP addresses from the router
dynamically (using DHCP managed by the router) in the same way that the
router gets its IP address from the v21 router that you're connected to.

You can find the LAN setup under the 'LAN IP setup' link. The 'IP
address' box at the top is the IP address of the router on the LAN side
- should be 192.168.0.1. Lower down the check box 'Use router as DHCP
server' means that the router will give the PCs attached to it their IP
addresses. Default values should be 192.168.0.2 to 192.168.0.254

Under 'Basic settings' and 'Internet IP address' the radio button 'get
dynamically from ISP' means that the router will get its IP address from
the ISP. This won't be anything like 192.168.0.... as these are used
exclusively for internal networks. 
> 
> >
> > DNS is a look up table which identifies www.google.com with the IP 
> > address 64.233.167.99.
> 
> That appears to be working fine.
> 
> >
> > You can check by pinging google, as already suggested.  Set the DNS 
> > server IP addresses in the router and then see if you can ping from it 
> > to google on 64.233.167.99.  Then put the DNS server IP addresses into 
> > your /etc/resolv.conf on your PC and any other machines on the network 
> > and check for connectivity with
> >
> > ping -c 2 64.233.167.99
> > ping -c 2 www.google.com
> >
> > Both will ping the same address, but you will only get a result from 
> > the second form if DNS is working throughout your network.
> >
> I'm completely lost on the bit above.  I have used gedit, but it was 
> sometime ago, (see I remembered something).  I'll go away and see if I 
> can remember what to do or if I have written it down somewhere.
gedit is a text editor and won't help you ping anything. You need to  
 open a shell so you get the command line and type in the instructions
 above. Ping sends a very simple message to the address you specify to
 see if you can get through at all. Usually if you can't ping something
 (especially a public website) then you won't be able to make any
 connection to the computer you're trying to connect to. 
> > Given you've been able to access your router's configuration and 
> > management programs, I'd say your gateway address from your PC to the 
> > router is correct.  It should be the router's IP address (192.168.0.1 
> > or whatever you are using). The gateway address on the Internet side 
> > is your external IP address given you by your ISP, whether DHCP or fixed.
> 
> It says DHCP on.  Right I shall dial up to access my ISP's website and 
> ask them for it. hopefully someone can tell me where to typ the 
> information when I have it.
> 
> >
> > Your router will be doing a lot of firewalling for you, but you might 
> > want to look at learning iptables so that you can set up your own 
> > firewall, or products like SmoothWall ( http://smoothwall.org/ ) for 
> > an idea of what's available doing the same thing with a GUI attached.
> 
> I thought I set up iptables when I installed fedora core 2???  It 
> appeared to be quite easy.  Just answered some questions about what I 
> would be doing with my machine.
You quite probably did enable iptables. I think Lesley's talking about
 configuring them beyond the default configuration. They provide a much
 finer control over the traffic to and from your machine than the
  router does, but (from my experience of them) you do need to have a
 reasonable understanding of the details of how networks handle the
 traffic on them.

Hope this helps

David


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