[luau] Oceanic cable modem service

[Warren Togami]

On Thu, 2003-09-11 at 22:30, kilauea wrote:
> Aloha ! I haven't been on the list in quite some time. Just had a 
> question about cable modem service. Oceanic will be hooking up my 
> service in the next week and I wanted to find out if there is a current 
> FAQ or HOWTO on Oceanic (Road Runner?) service. A couple of years ago I 
> had a one way cable modem (HSA Kauai) and used DHCP to get an IP 
> address. The Oceanic service will be two way: Most Excellent.
> Is there any thing else I should be thinking of:  /etc/hosts, 
> /etc/hosts.allow, gateway setting, firewall settings? I know enough to 
> tweak things but I am far from a sys adm in understanding. I have a 
> couple of machines on a home network. How should I configure the 
> firewall on the machine that connects to the cable modem? I have Grub 
> booting four flavors of Linux (Slack and RH primarly) and I am mostly 
> interested in web and ftp access.  Any examples or pointers will help; I 
> will try LDP for the latest Howto (DHCP / cable modem).
> Also they want to use the USB port. I had my last cable modem connected 
> by ethernet and don't know if there is any special settings needed for 
> USB. I have fast ethernet running already but I have not used the USB 
> port before although it looks like the ports are recognized.

You will find that Oceanic's cable modems are exceedingly easy to use
with Linux.  The Toshiba cable modems that I have seen them use more
recently have both a USB and Ethernet connector.  I have never tried to
use the USB in Linux, although I suspect it might be possible, I believe
it is not worth the hassle when the ethernet works fine.

You simply set the Linux ethernet interface to DHCP, and it will grab
the IP/subnetmask/gateway/DNS.

I didn't fully understand your questions, but it sounds like you want to
run web and FTP servers?  Technically they are against Oceanic Time
Warner's (not sure about Earthlink) TOS, but they haven't been cracking
down on that locally AFAIK.  If you use it for strictly personal reasons
and traffic is very low I am guessing they wouldn't care.

Regarding FTP server, DO NOT USE IT because it is inherently unsafe. 
Use ssh instead to protect yourself.  There are many easy and free
ssh/scp/sftp clients available for Linux, Windows and MacOS X so there
is no excuse for anyone to continue to use FTP these days.  (But if you
use the FTP server only on your local LAN, that is fairly safe.)

http://www.mplug.org/phpwiki/index.php/BasicFirewallRouter
Follow this simple guide to learn how to quickly setup a Linux box with
two ethernet cards into a "cable/dsl sharing router".  The internal LAN
plugged into eth1 can then share the Internet connection with little
fuss.  If you have any questions about the details of setting this up
please ask here.  MonMotha the firewall author is a member of this
mailing list, and many other subscribers are very familiar with it so
they should be able to answer your questions quickly.

Finally, are you aware of how to automatically download and apply
security updates for your Linux distribution?  It is exceedingly easy
and free to do so on Red Hat/Mandrake/SuSE/Conectiva/Debian (but less so
on Slackware), so please do so in order to prevent yourself from being a
victim one day.

ANY box not maintained, be it Windows or Linux, will be insecure within
a month or two.  And they WILL find you, even if you think your box is
unimportant.  They actually WANT to crack seemingly unimportant boxes
because they can use your system as an attack platform for a longer
period of time while you don't notice that you were compromised. 
Anyhow, please heed this warning, and ASK if you don't know how to use
the automatic update tools.  We will help you.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com