I need to take firebird (the Phoenyx box) down for a few minutes tomorrow (Tuesday) night to install a second network interface card (NIC) so we can hook the machine up to DSL. (The machine acts as the firewall for our private network, aka Karen and Carl's Windows boxes, so it has one NIC for the private network and a second NIC to connect to the Internet. It's the same setup we have now, except the second "NIC" is a serial port attached to a modem.) The dedicated modem will remain attached and will be the primary Internet gateway until we verify that DSL is working properly and get nameservice redirected. It shouldn't take me more than a few minutes to plug in the new card, boot to a DOS floppy and configure it (I hate Plug'n'Play, jumperless cards that you can't set manually), and boot back up. If I get the drivers configured right before shutting down, I shouldn't even have to reboot once it comes back up. So we should be back on the net within twenty minutes if things go smoothly. BUT, that's not the end of the story. I'm then going to start monkeying with the routing tables, which tell the machine where to send traffic for what network. At the moment the routing table just says 127.* is the local network and everything else is directed at the gateway machine on that network. I'm going to try rerouting a small network block (our upstream provider's) over the DSL interface. If all goes well, you won't notice a thing, even if the DSL doesn't work. (Unless you happen to be a SouthWind subscriber. :) If something goes wrong, I may mess up routing for everything and we'd effectively drop off the net. If that happens, a reboot will clear things up. (I like Linux... I can muck with the routing tables live, without having to reboot or anything.) I *do* have some experience with doing this on my personal box... I'd dial into work and set up routing for work's network across the modem interface and everything else directed at the gateway box. Was simple and worked fine. Wish me luck. -- -------------------------------------------------------------- Listowner tools are found at http://www.phoenyx.net/listowners
