Long ago (at least in terms of the history of electronic data processing) having two computers at the same time was something you read about in science fiction novels. As systems became more common, the time eventually arrived when a company or university would have two computers. The need then arose that data be exchanged between the two machines. This was the beginning of SNEAKER-Net (Slow, Non-Electrical Activity, Keeping Everyone Running), which was developed in the 1950s. With SNEAKER-Net, the technician copied data onto a tape or other media and, using his sneakers, ran the tape over to the other machine to be loaded. In many organizations, SNEAKER-Net is still employed today as this is often the only type of network some people think they can afford.

This tutorial is about configuring a router on FreeBSD operating system using IPFIREWALL (ipfw).

If you have Windows PCs on your home network and have no pressing reason to use NFS (Network File System) support to share files, then read no farther. NFS is actually more robust than Samba, but it is also more complicated depending upon what features are used. From a basic point of view, NFS and Samba are very similar. Both have a client and server application. Both allow a server to share files with clients. Both have clients and servers on almost every platform. The big difference is the Windows PCs have Samba-compatible clients and servers as part of their default network support and Windows requires third party software to support NFS. Conversely, UNIX systems usually come with and use NFS by default with Samba being used to provide file sharing with Windows PCs.

The only sure way to lock down a PC is to disconnect it from any network and never load a program or a document file that supports macros. That is rather impractical especially when our goal is to connect the network to the Internet. There are a number of avenues and methods through which security of a network can be breached. Attacks from the Internet through the firewall are the ones we look at here. Other threats include computer viruses and insider manipulation.

NDISWrapper is a tool that allows the use of Windows wireless drivers in Linux. Most distrobutions support NDISWrapper and SUSE is no exception. In fact, it is shipped with SUSE. This is good because there is no need to find a source to the internet in order to download the necessary files. I will be using SUSE version 10.0 (the opensource/free version), but the setup is almost identical in 9.3.

Let me first start off by saying this is not really a how-to document. It is more of a what I did document. Obviously this won't work for everyone, but it might give you a good idea about what you can do with DNS. I am writing this for myself and will share it because you might learn something. If I skip over something that you don't understand, I am sorry. If you need help or have questions about this article, go ahead and create a post in the appropriate forum.

In case you don’t already know, NDISWrapper is a tool for Linux that allows the use of Windows drivers. This is almost always used for wireless network drivers. It is a very simple way of setting up a previously unsupported device in Linux. This article will describe the setup of NDISWrapper and the installation of the wireless network device driver.

The Microsoft Network Neighborhood relies on an underlying technology called "NetBIOS over TCP/IP" to work. This all works fine on a small LAN, as it relies on network broadcasts, but it can fail over a WAN as many routers cannot forward NetBIOS broadcasts, or they may be performing Network Address Translation which may cause the broadcasts to fail as they contain IP addresses--not only in the header, but in the data.

Server Message Block (SMB), also known as Common Internet File System (CIFS), is one of the most common protocols for sharing files on a network. It is used with Microsoft Windows and, through Samba, a variety of other operating systems include Linux. Samba provides a way to share the contents of Linux directories with other computers and to access shared directories on a remote computer. The type of remote computer does not matter. It could be a computer running Sun Solaris or Windows NT.

Linux can route network traffic from one network segment to another. Routing is normally done on a PC with two or more network adapters. This article presents a configuration using a pair of Ethernet adapters. More specifically, the article examines how a Linux computer can link a local network to the Internet through an Ethernet-attached device like a cable modem or a DSL modem. The article examines the basic concepts pertaining to routing, network address translation (NAT), firewalls, and a program called ipchains. Individual sections address each concept. The last section combines the basics into a sample configuration for linking a local network to the Internet.