Endless Paradigm

Right. I've moved into Uni halls of residence and the 2Mb/sInternet connection is absolutely chocolatee. I can pay for a faster connection but that's only 8Mb/s. It's also exclusivly wired with no wireless access available. I've plugged in an old D-Link router to use as a wireless bridge but only 1 MAC adress is allowed to connect at any one time through the ethernet socket in my room.

So, my plan is: Use my baby server with 2 ethernet ports to act as a bridge/router/firewall between my own little network in and around my room and the outside world. I'd connect 1 port to the wall socket and the other to the D-Link router. The routrer would then distribute Internet access to all my devices. The advantage of this is that the building's internet connection access server thingies only see 1 MAC adress connected to my wall socket: My server's MAC adress. That solves that problem.

The next problem is actually forwarding acces for the appropriate services through the server to the outside world. Basically it needs to be as trasparent as possible. I'd rather not set up the server as a proxy as that means all kinds of setting up on my devices. I know that this can be done on Windows with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) but I don't know of a Linux equivalent.

Here's a quick and dirty diagram of what I'm trying to acheive:



Any ideas anyone?

Bridge the two NICs on the server.  It's equivalent to hooking the router directly to the wall socket.  Routers generally act as a NAT device so the outside world will only see one IP/MAC.

I've been doing some Googling (I know I should Google before posting) and partly solved the problem. I'm able to access the Internet through the server with as many devices as I want now. But, DNS doesn't seem to be working properly.

The server now has a DHCP server running on it to assign an IP, a gateway and DNS server to all the connected devices. The gateway bit is working fine but it won't assign the building's ISP's DNS server automatically. Everything else is given automatically but I stil have to set the DNS server on each device.

I'm using dhcp3-server to do the DHCP and Firestarter as the NAT firewall.

I can live with it as it is at the moment but I'd like it to be working completely seamlessly.

Also, I must say Zinga that you've been a big help getting everything sorted. Guides and tutorials are nice but they only account for the environment that the author was working in. With the speed of development these days they go out of date quickly. I try my best to adapt them to my environment but with my fairly limited knowledge of Linux and networking I can only get so far. It's good to be able to have an actual conversation with someon who knows what they're doing.

If you can assign DNS to each device manually, just use the DNS server on your router, network, or use something like OpenDNS.
I don't know how to configure your DHCP server to send the correct DNS server.  Perhaps try assigning it to the router's DNS server instead.  It may be possible that the building's DNS server is a part of a different subnet which can't be (or not configured to be) routed from addresses behind your router, so using the router's DNS should work, as should something like OpenDNS.

ZiNgA BuRgA Wrote: [ -> ]If you can assign DNS to each device manually, just use the DNS server on your router, network, or use something like OpenDNS.
I don't know how to configure your DHCP server to send the correct DNS server.  Perhaps try assigning it to the router's DNS server instead.  It may be possible that the building's DNS server is a part of a different subnet which can't be (or not configured to be) routed from addresses behind your router, so using the router's DNS should work, as should something like OpenDNS.

That's exactly what I'm having to do. My problem is that it won't do it automatically.