Home Networking

I've been through several generations of home networking setup.

Our first home networking attempt used Internet Connection Sharing on Win98SE, but prooved too unreliable for what we wanted.

Our next setup used Wingate as the dialup gateway when we had ISDN. This worked ok, but did have its restrictions. On dialup, it was damned near impossible to have internal servers, but generally was reliable. It connected when you wanted it to and didn't when you didn't which was an improvement over ICS. It also featured a more effective firewall.

The second setup used a Vigor 2200USB router as the gateway. As this device implements a firewall and has LAN to LAN VPN capabilities, it worked well for over a year. For some reason though, I've had two go down with exactly the same failure characteristics. At first I thought it was a complete power supply failure, but the switch part continued to work - only the router didn't work.

Eventually, I gave up with the Vigor and moved over to a Linux-based firewall and gateway. I've run Linux servers at home (and work for that matter) for years - over six years, and my web server and database server are both running on a SuSE distribution. The Linux firewall system I chose is one called IpCop which allows me to run-home SMTP, POP3 and IMAP servers as well as a web server, and makes life with laptops easier with DHCP. The IpCop system was developed from the Smoothwall implementation. I once had the misfortune to ask for some support on the Smoothwall IRC channel only to end up in a slanging match with the project lead for no real reason other than he fancied having a go at someone. Apparently, I'm not the only person this has happened to.

We have a couple of laptops in the home as well as all the desktops and servers. Both laptops have got WiFi cards so we can roam around the joint. I have a Netgear wireless access point sat on the LAN providing a gateway for the laptops.

Our external connectivity is a 512k RADSL link on the BT backbone, services provided by Force9 in Sheffield. It certainly beats the hell out of dialup.