This month I'll report on my experiences with ADSL and OS/2.
Recently my long awaited ADSL connection was installed. The decisions leading to the visit by the technician was long and educational. First I had to choose a provider whose product wouldn't be limited to a specific operating system, this meant a router based producted. Secondly I needed a product where incoming server trafic was allowed (for use with my FidoNet and OS2NET system). A third parameter would normally be availabilty of the product, but in my case it wasn't a problem since all (currently three) ADSL providers in my country are represented where I live.
Now that I had chosen the ADSL provider I only needed to hand in my order and wait. The waiting turned out to be rather long as the provider was still in the process of making arrangements with the suppliers. After having waited many months, during which the prices dropped considerably, I finally received an order confirmation and a "date" with a technician.
The installation was a breeze since the necessary cabling was already available in my apartment, thanks to a closed ISDN line. When the technician had left I only needed to connect the ADSL router's UPC cable to my ethernet card and my connection was up and running. But before the plugging in, I had in fact spent the past months getting information on hardware, software and security options, and switching from BNC to UPC cabling and network cards, plus adding a small hub.
Hardware
Several sites recommended installing two network cards in the gateway computer and to use a hub to connect the remaining computers to the gateway computer. I followed this advice, using two "classic" 3COM 3c509b combo cards, connecting the ADSL router to one card and the hub to the other. Each card is on its own network to prevent anyone from the Internet accessing my other computers. Bascially each network card has its own set of IP addresses, i.e. 192.168.1.x and 192.168.2.x, where the first set is used by the router and gateway/firewall, while the other is used by the other computers on the intranet.
Software
Making all this possible required a piece of software (or expensive hardware), in my case I chose In-Joy Firewall by F/X Communications, the makers of the Injoy Dialer which had already severed me faithfully for years.
Injoy Firewall includes everything needed to protect your network and make it possible for the computer to act as a gateway for the other computers on the intranet. If TCP/IP is set up correctly in OS/2, installing Injoy Firewall only takes a couple of minutes and a reboot. The reboot is needed to install F/X Communication's driver which inspects and filters all packets. With F/X Communication's driver installed it isn't possible to run MPTS (it doesn't recognize the driver), this is covered in the Injoy Firewall's documentation and isn't a big deal as it is easily removed and reinserted in case anything needs changing.
As I'm no expert on TCP/IP or networking I spent some time trying to figure out the differences between OS/2 and Windows networking parameters, since my provider's documentation took it for granted that I was running Windows. It turned out to be no big deal, but since I obviously didn't want to leave my computer open to everyone due to my misunderstanding something, I was very careful with this part of the installation. I even had a friend port scanning my server to search for any unexpectedly open ports (there were none).
The Gateway
With the hardware installed and working properly, and the software set up and double checked, I started adding my other computers to the hub, modifying the TCP/IP settings to use my own server as the Internet gateway and keeping the DNS settings pointing to my provider (which had been my dial-up provider). Now that I had gained a bit of experience with gateways, it only took a few minutes to modify the TCP/IP settings of my other computes, running OS/2, GNU/Linux and even Windows.
Conclusion
There are many different ADSL configurations available, but if you intend to use OS/2 (or anything but Windows) as your server software with an ADSL connection, I recommend getting a solution with a router. Similar to getting an external modem or ISDN adapter instead of a card to be inserted in your computer - if the router (or the modem/ISDN adapter) crashes, you don't have to reboot your computer. Having been a sysop of a bulletin board system (BBS) for eight years have taught me that it is very important to use external rather than internal equipment.
My ADSL setup have been working flawlessly for three months. The router (Cisco 677) seems to be very stable and haven't crashed once. Injoy Firewall has been running equally flawlessly taking very few system resources on my low memory, low CPU server with plenty of other tasks to perform.
I may come back to this subject in the future if anything interesting comes up. If you have any questions after having read this report then feel free to contact me.
Please do not hesitate to send me any other news from around Scandinavia.