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

[James Bromberger]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2001 at 12:47:18PM +0800, Jason :) wrote:
> > 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).

Agreed. The ping times from here (Woodlands/Doubleview, Telstra 512 Kbps) 
are around:
PING wireplay.com.au (192.148.139.76): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.148.139.76: icmp_seq=0 ttl=119 time=85.4 ms
64 bytes from 192.148.139.76: icmp_seq=1 ttl=119 time=73.6 ms
64 bytes from 192.148.139.76: icmp_seq=2 ttl=119 time=76.8 ms
64 bytes from 192.148.139.76: icmp_seq=3 ttl=119 time=76.0 ms

--- wireplay.com.au ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = 73.6/77.9/85.4 ms


Compared to (256 Kbps DSL with Iinet from Osborne Park):
PING www.ii.net (203.59.24.221) from 203.59.220.18 : 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from mambo.iinet.net.au (203.59.24.221): icmp_seq=0 ttl=251 time=37.459 msec
64 bytes from mambo.iinet.net.au (203.59.24.221): icmp_seq=1 ttl=251 time=37.329 msec
64 bytes from mambo.iinet.net.au (203.59.24.221): icmp_seq=2 ttl=251 time=36.189 msec

--- www.ii.net ping statistics ---
3 packets transmitted, 3 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/mdev = 36.189/36.992/37.459/0.591 ms


Of course, no one is going to use a volume charged DSL account at home, 
because you're likely to always exceed 500 MB per month (amount varies 
based upon product/plan) free allocation, and then pay 15x - 20x per meg 
after that. So you would have to look at iPrimus, Telstra, Request DSL. 
I know of people who have dropped iPrimus because their service was 
very bad, and they took weeks to repair a broken exchange installation, 
aparently, or something like that. Everyone I know is going for Telstra DSL.


> > 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.


Well, you don't want X on it, and you don't want pine on it. In fact, here 
is a list of things that should probably run on it:

	* NULL

OK, perhaps a little more:
	* SSHD (so you can get 'home' when you are outside your net)
	* Squid, Bind (bound only to your internal network interface)

As far as being slow, bah-humbug. any Pentium is fine. 

As I said earlier today, run nmap on the internal and external interfaces, 
with the default tcp scan and the -sU UDP scan. There are a lot of probes 
from random remote machines when you are on DSL. Never connect a Win9X machine 
with file sharing enabled. No, never!

Anyway, the above is all "apparently", because I only have one Windows 98 
computer here, which is what my DSL was deployed to. Of course. How silly 
of me to suggest anything else...   :)

  James

-- 
 James Bromberger <james_AT_rcpt.to> www.rcpt.to/~james

       * *  C u in Bordeaux - 1st Debian Conference, July 2001 * * 
 Remainder moved to http://www.rcpt.to/~james/james/sig.html
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