Home Network, step by step?

[David Adam]

On Sun, 12 Dec 2004, darren kirby wrote:

> There are a couple ways you can accomplish this. First, and easiest, is simply
> to go to your local big-block computer store and purchase yourself a switch.
> These can be had for ~$50 Plug the switch into your <internet facing device>
> and plug your two boxes into the switch. Configure them both to obtain an IP
> using dhcp. Your done.  In this example <internet facing device> is
> presumably a cable or adsl modem. You need to explain how you access the
> internet.

Darren,

This will not always work. Case in point: The SB5100 Cable Modem. It's
just a bridge device.

> The second, and more educational way is to equip and configure either your
> freebsd or linux box to do NAT/Masq. This will require you to have two
> ethernet cards in the router. Essentially you are just daisy chaining the
> computers physically in this example. As for setup of the NAT, I only know
> how to do this on linux myself, so I hope someone more knowlegable can point
> us _both_ to some docs on NAT/Masq on freebsd.

To do NAT/IP Masquerading, you're probably best off in the long run
learning how to use one of FreeBSD's fine packet-filtering firewalls:
the relatively new (to FreeBSD) OpenBSD's pf or the somewhat older ipf. I
recommend pf - it works very well for me.

The FreeBSD Handbook contains information on firewalls:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/firewalls.html
The pf section is short and sweet to get you up and running with pf:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/firewalls-pf.html

I hope that helps you.

(And finally, freebsd-newbies is the WRONG LIST for these queries.)

Cheers,

David Adam
---
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