Posted: 9/9/2009 11:11:16 AM EDT
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I live in a rural area, up till recently my only option was dial-up internet service. Recently, a wireless ISP put a transmitter on a water tower not far off and the guys are here now hooking me up for higher speed internet. They say the antenna here can freeze up in thw winter, so I want to maintain my dial-up account, and that's where my questions begin.
My home network is on a switch, and the ISP wants to see an IP address on my end 24/7, so I hung a router off my switch, they will come in thru the WAN port on the router. This way they will always see the router WAN IP on my end, but I can disconnect the router from my LAN when I'm not using the network for security. The router has provisions for a modem/dial-up connection, in addition to the fast ethernet WAN port, but it has never worked. Therefore I'm using a Win98SE box as a proxy server, running ICS, and also acting as a DHCP server for the LAN. The other PCs on the LAN now know to look to the Win98SE proxy for DNS lookups and internet access, is there any chance the proxy server will..."hog access"... to the high-speed internet link, act as a router, forcing the other PCs to route via ICS when I'm not on dlal-up? I can shut down ICS, and either hard code IP addys in the LAN PCs, ro even use the router as a DHCP server, but then I have network problems when rebooting with the router disconnected from the LAN. Further, if the wireles internet service goes down, it would take much longer to re-configure to bring up the old dial-up connection. Basically, I'm looking to keep the ICS proxy as-is, and have either/or access to the net, wireless most of the time, easy fallback to the modem connected to the proxy machine. How do I need to set this up to work best? Gateways, where should the DHCP server live, will ICS try to hog/route internet traffic over the wireless link, etc. Any help you can give will be appreciated. |
| Is it a Cisco router? If so, hang a modem off your aux port and have your router dial/auth your dial-up account, then do a floating static or similar. Worst case scenario, you'd have to manually hit your router and flip the route if your wireless link "goes down" but not in a fashion that would cause the interface to go down/down. |
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1) Get a router (Decent one's are like $30 these days) 2) turn on inside dhcp on the router but only for the non RRAS boxes 3) Disable your outside interface and set up a static route that gets redistributed through RRAS when you're on dial-up (You can also just weight the routes via RRAS and have dial-up fire off if your wireless get's too lossy) 4) FFFFFuuuuuuccccc win9x 5) Yeah it's kinda harder to set up than ICS but 98 is a steaming pile of shit |
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98SE has a couple things going for it.
1. All my older (expensive) software runs on it, mapping programs, CAD, Photoshop, Office, etc. Vista, not so much. 2. It lets me do things like release my DHCP leases, renew them, without an admin token. Vista, not so much. 3. It stays OFF the internet when I tell it to. Vista stays off the internet when I max the firewall and unplug the NIC. 4. It lets my apps SCREAM on the newer hardware, instead of bogging down with a bunch of useless animations and other shit that just wastes RAM and CPU cycles, for my purposes anyway. My Win98 machines open Photoshop just a fuzz faster than my Vista box does, on hardware 2 generations older. Don't see the point of buying a smoking box, then seeing it run slower than an old machine because of a fat ass bloated OS, but Bill is Bill and doesn't see things my way. I do like Vista's stability, Microsoft has come a long way in error handling routines. Not quite as stable as Unix, but close, and it does some handy tricks now and then too. In any event, trying to run ICS on the Win98 box is a no go, for now anyway. I ended up having to enable DHCP on the router, and un-install ICS on the proxy to get back here, via wireless. I can live with that for now. I will configure the other LAN nodes to get their IPs from the router, and if the wireless link goes down, I can alway just access the net via the old proxy , on modem/dial-up, though the rest of the LAN won't be able to. I don't have high hopes that any router will run the modem properly. it's a nice one USR, but it seems to be real picky and has never worked hung off the serial port on either of two routers. I suspect it would if I got a commercial grade Crisco, but that's more than I want to spend. That would be a nice solution, let the router find the fastest path to the net, regardless of wireless status, but since this modem doesn't run that way, it's off the table. This modem is required out here. The rural phone lines SUCK, more cross traffic and dropped packets, fragments, etc than you can believe. The best any other modem has ever achieved out here was 24 kbps, while the USR external gets me 44 kbps. Sooo...in the here and now, I'll let the router serve DHCP, reconfig the LAN nodes, and settle for one box access via modem if wirelsss goes down. over time I may stumble onto a better solution, but this will work for now. Thanks to those who replied, I appreciate the fast help, you guys rock. |