[plug] Wanted: some Telstra ADSL in Perth & Firewall advice

[Jason :)]

Hi

Mark Nold wrote:

> Hi guys,
> 
> I'm new to this list and i'd like to ask a question or two (or three),
> 
> 1. Is Telstra ADSL worthwhile? Currently i'm spending approx $70/month for a 
> reliable dial-up so as long as the ADSL is reliable i'm not much worse off. But 
> i like the possibility of also being able to play games like 
> Infiltration/Unreal Tournament/ Age of Empires etc, is this realistic with ADSL 
> in Perth?

 From what I've heard from people at uni, the service is reliable, but 
it's not wonderful for games because telstra doesn't have a POP in Perth 
and everything goes through Melbourne (=increased lag).

> 
> 2. Basically i was thinking of having a Pentium 120 (32Mb Ram, + 2Gb hardisk) 
> Linux server acting as firewall and the machine that is permanently on. I was 
> also considering putting a very tight version of Apache on (no CGI etc) to 
> serve as a home page (listing our most used links etc nothing much else), plus 
> maybe Squid and a mail server (no idea what though). Am i right in thinking 
> that the firewall machine shouldnt have these things running on it? Or is it 
> possible to do this securley as i only really wish to have one machine 
> permanently on, and i dont want my girlfriend to have to turn another machine 
> on/off just to check mail etc.

That's the way I have my home network set up. Only thing is that unless 
you want to use something like pine (or another text based mail client), 
a Pentium 120 will be very slow to run X-Windows for and graphical mail 
clients.

>