Hi Jim
  I'll try to keep this option alive for you....
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: inkleput{at}isp.com
> In
>

> ,
> on 01/16/07 
>    at 04:08 AM, rallee2{at}comcast.net said:
> 
> Thank you very much for the great piece on my networking opitons.  In
> reply I'll do a lot of snipping and ask a couple questions on what's left. 
> There will, no doubt, be plenty of re-reading to do.
> 
> >etc etc.  IOW one can setup a standalone PC which requires very little
> >power such as the aforementioned 486 and as long as it has 2 separate
> >devices that can be networked (direct cable connection, modem, nic, etc.)
> >one as "internet" and one (or several) as an
"intranet", that machine can
> >act as a router/firewall.
> 
> First question.  How much machine is needed?  That is, both wire and wifi
> and assumedly/eventually broadband, talk awfully fast and "any old PC"
> lying around doesn't.  Why woudn't such a machine be a bottleneck?
> 
   If you were to look inside a commercial router you would see extremely
little processing power since all that really must be done is to
"route".  The bandwidth is in the interface.  So as long as your
NIC equals or exceeds (almost impossible to *not* do so) the bandwidth of
your modem, it's all gravy. Really the greatest limiting factor in
homebuilt routers has to do with ram capacity more than processing power. 
It is easy to forget what with 2Gigs of Ram commonplace these days that
some 486 boxes topped out at 64Megs of ram.  That will run Freesco just
fine but is quite low for most CD based OS's.  I assumed that once you got
broadband you'd use your existing wifi router as *the* router since it
already has, I'd guess, ethernet ports. No?

> >However I found that it
> >seemd far more daunting than it was especially in the case of Freesco
> >which when booted in "router" mode simply asked me a
series of questions
> >such as the IRQ of each networking device (if they weren't PNP) the
> >desired networking addresses assignments and bingo! it was working.
> 
> My worst nightmare - figuring out what numbers or what kind of numbers
> they really want and finding them, picking them out or making them up.  I
> searched and read for a couple years, all kinds of networking
> "explanations" that said all you have to do is fill in the
numbers - "this
> way."  It was always assumed that you just knew what they were talking
> about - where and/or how to get what numbers and what sort of numbers was
> never covered.  I have a couple IP numers someone suggested that make my
> present P2P work.  Just seeing "DNS" printed somewhere puts
me into shock,
> sort of like when I was 5 and believed I saw Germans sneaking through the
> door into my bedroom after listening to war news on the old radio!
> 
  Well that can be a problem.  If you have a plug-n-play NIC and are using
a PNP bios based motherboard you will only need to check the POST screen
for what IRQ is used by the modem since the system will autodetect the NIC
(and in some cases even the modem).  That does leave the networking values
though and though the defaults are often quite serviceable, it certainly
would be better if you planned it out for yourself.  It really isn't all
that hard even though a modem connection results in ever changing
addresses.  Your ISP handles the changing ones and the internal addresses
are static and commonplace.  Whatever you choose as the "Gateway"
address (the one which connects one IP to the other, or internal to
external) becomes the internal DNS.  Externally your ISP has it's own DNS
of which you can remain blissfully ignorant if you desire.

  Incidentally there used to be a couple of really well done websites for
OS/2 users for setting up networking manually.  It seems to me Trish and
another lady's name were both quite succint and clear, even to the newb I
was back when I first tried to network Warp 3.

> >Jimmy
> 
> Thanks a lot.
> 
No prob
> JimL
> 
> -- 
> "Feel inadequate?  Destroy stuff and kill people."
Confucious, Socrates, 
> Benjamin Franklin
> 




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



 
Yahoo! Groups Links

 To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/os2hardware/

 Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

 To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/os2hardware/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

 To change settings via email:
    mailto:os2hardware-digest{at}yahoogroups.com 
    mailto:os2hardware-fullfeatured{at}yahoogroups.com

 To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    os2hardware-unsubscribe{at}yahoogroups.com

 Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 

---