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Re: [LUG] Broadband

 

On 5/13/05, Robin Cornelius <robin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Friday 13 May 2005 20:00, George Duller wrote:
One of my friends uses Suse 9.1 and wishes to have a broadband
connection to the web. He has sought my advice, but as I have absolutely
no experience of broadband I am seeking your help.

I personaly use demon and have had good performance with them, they seem to
have at least heard of linux etc as there support pages even give info on
setting up your mail in kmail. Eclipse are suppose to be good too but no
personal experience, they are SW based as well.

I've been using Virgin - their limited 15gb/month service is enough
for a 3 pc home network (although I work in london 3 days a week and
usually do my large downloads there, but have downloaded a bunch of
ISOs fairly quickly and without hitting my limits), their customer
support is ok although the helpline is 50p a min or something (rather
embarresingly they diagnosed a problem I had in under a minute despite
my protests that it was something at their end -- always check your
cables!).
 
I think the key here is to NOT end up with a modem that is no good. I would
select a DIY broadband package (no modem included), go to your favorate PC
shop and buy a broadband router this will save *loads* of headaches it gives
some firewall/NAT protection by its very nature and generaly *just works*.

This is very true - I would consider it essential to invest in a
decent modem/firewall/router - netgear do wired and wired/wireless for
about 50 quid (the wireless is 5 to 10 quid more). Our netgear
modem/router/firewall has protected 2 linux and 1 win xp laptop with
no need for personal firewalls on the XP laptop.

Software firewalls for XP just won't cut it, and you want a decent
firewall between your linux box and the internet if you haven't locked
it down as some distro's will leave you with vulnerable php and other
services running out of the box, even if you have locked down your
machine it saves wasting cpu on fending off attacks -- even a good
iptables setup won't help you against DOS and some other attacks that
will bring your machine to a crawl.

Cheers,

A.

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