Lan building, ideal setup. good modem

volkan · Post by **volkan** » Fri Jan 07, 2005 8:15 am

My LAN now is just a modem/router & pc. That's it. After experimenting alot i'm planning to set up an stable and fast LAN.

What i've noticed is that my modem with router makes my ping times go up. if i just turn on the router firewall my ping times go up at least 100ms.

What i want is a modem without router, just modem, that's it with an rj11 and an rj45 and an external ip that will be used be the connected machine and not the modem itself. This should keep pingtimes and packed loss to a minimum.

Then connect this modem to a PII machine running Freebsd which does all the net services.
I also considered getting an pci adsl card to put in the freebsd machine. this would be the most ideal situation for speed and security.

Now the problem for me is finding this hardware. Modems without router funcionality are very rare. I had an asus modem that was exactly what i wanted but had a lot of problems with it. There are Alcatel modems with one port but they have nice web interfaces which means they have an ip which means it gives out internal addresses.
Let alone pci modem cards for ISDN.

Do you guys have some suggestions for me what would be the best way to set up my LAN.

Thanx

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 3:56 pm

Cable modem? to get a cable modem without a router shouldnt be that tough.

motorola, RCA, Toshiba, Netgear, hell Zoom even makes an internal cable modem.

Personally it sounds like u just have a crappy router.

andy7079 · Post by **andy7079** » Sun Jan 09, 2005 11:53 pm

if you're only running one machine on your network, there's no need for a router. Then you should get a dsl modem. they sell them at electronics stores, such as best buy and circuit city, and are made my manufacturers such as Dlink and Lynksis. (mine is a creative broadband blaster from covad). Anyhow, the modem could connect directly into the NIC on your pc, and use a software firewall. One PC doesn't warrant a router. If you have more than one pc, u have two options. You can use a modem and a router running NAT to split the connection, or you can put two NIC cards in the FreeBsd machine, one connects directly to a modem, the other to your network switch. then you have to get either a proxy server or NAT program to run on the FreeBsd machine to split the connection. hope it helps.

volkan · Post by **volkan** » Mon Jan 10, 2005 8:03 pm

It's a Adsl connection. 8mbit down, 1 mbit up.

There will be more pc's connected in my network. at least two servers will be running 24/7

My network connection is really excellent, low packet loss, low pings. But it's hardware that messes up. hence the freebsd machine for network services.

Maybe i do have a crappy router. I have the SMC 7804WBRB.
Every single service on the this router makes my connection lose speed. so everything is off except for dhcp server and NAT. wireless, upnp and firewall are off. Also, all ports are forwarded to the same pc.

I know that if i run all the services on the freebsd server they won't mess up my connection.

I couldn't get the router to be a modem and do nothing else, so that my freebsd will get my external ip address. If anyone knows how to do this it would be really great.