NETWORKING-HOME NETWORK

NETWORKING-HOME NETWORK

How to configure/install a Simple Home Network with a Cable Modem for any Linux distro and a Windows (98 or 2K) PC

Written by Susan Macchia Jan/Feb, 2001
Updated, May 19, 2003

History

I had DELL Dimension V400, Pentium II that I bought with Windows98 in 1998. It had a DEC 20401A ethernet card attached to a cable modem. I added a 30G hard drive, on which I installed Caldera EDesktop 2.4. I had another PC with Windows 98 that was built in pieces over the years (Pentium I, 120 mhz, 5G disk, and a DEC20401A ethernet card); I will call this the Noname PC. I wanted the other PC to be able to use the printer and cable modem on my linux box. And for other members of my family since the Linux box was my machine which I used for my work (and fun!).

I purchased a Linksys Etherfast NIC and put it in my linux box. It used the same driver as the DEC NIC (tulip), but the linux box couldn't see the card. After trying a variety of things, I put the Linksys card in the Noname PC and put the DEC card in my Linux box. Now my linux box has 2 NICS that are the same. When I did this I could see both cards but couldn't get out on the net because of where they were in the PCI slots. So I swapped the cards and now I could see both cards and could proceed from here.

What to Do

I recommend putting 2 of the same cards in the Linux box and any other kind of cards in the second machine.

1) On the Linux box su to root and run ifconfig. If you don't see both cards, run ifconfig -a, and add the card via Webmin or another GUI tool. Redhat 8.0 has a GUI that you can access from the the desktop menu (select: System Settings | Network
This will open the Network Configuration utility).

eth0 should be the card going to the cable modem. If our ISP gives you a static IP, put it there with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. If your ISP dynamically assigns an IP address, make the NIC use DHCP.
eth1 should be the card connected to your hub. Give it an internal IP like 192.168.1.10, with the same netmask as eth0
Both cards should be set up to start on boot.
Files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts are updated. You can take a look at ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 to see the configurations. 'ifconfig' should now show both cards.

2) Configure pmfirewall so that it lets in the range of internal address that you want to have access to the linux box (192.168.1.10/50, for example). pmfirewall can be found at:

http://www.pmfirewall.com/PMFirewall/

3) On the windows box do the following:

Right click on the network neighborhood and select Properites, and choose TCP/IP and properties.
Click on the IP tab and assigned it an internal IP like 102.168.1.20.
Click on the WINS tab and put add the IP address of the Linux box's internal NIC (192.168.1.10)
Click on the Gateway tab and add the IP address of the Linux box's internal NIC (192.168.1.10)
Click on the DNS tab, enable DNS, and put in your ISP's host name and domain name and add your ISP DNS server address. I ran into trouble here because my ISP usually had DNS disabled. I found out how to find this out using nslookup which gave me the following info:
Default Server: lwpxy02.ne.mediaone.net
Address: 24.128.232.6

So for me, the host was lwpxy02, the domain name was ne.mediaone.net and the address was 24.128.232.6.

On newer distros, nslookup is deprecated. You can use dig to find out similar information.

4) Configure Netscape by picking Edit->Preferences

Pick Advanced->Proxies. Make sure the "direct connection to the internet" option is selected.

Now you should be able to browse from the Windows box. You should also be able to telnet and ftp to/from either box using the internal network addresses.

5) Modify /etc/hosts on the Linux box

You'll want to edit this file to add your windows box. You will also probably want to add your own NIC
Mine looks like this:

24.218.81.235 susan.macchia.net susan
192.168.1.10 susan
192.168.1.20 windows

You can also try to automatically create this with the following lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local

IP=`ifconfig eth0 | head -2 | tail -1 | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{print $1}'`
cat << !EOF! > /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
$IP susan.macchia.net susan
192.168.1.10 susan
192.168.1.20 windows
!EOF!

Replacing the names with your own.