So, most of you know my internet situation, but for those who don't -- recap. I have dialup because DSL/Cable isn't available in my area and my whole family combined could hardly afford satellite / verizon. As such, my internet is slow. Anyhow, my family is ignorant to the fact that dialup is made for one user at a time and convinced me to network all our computers together, so I did. Anyhow, that technology is obsolete enough that dialup routers are off the market and as far as I know all are destroyed or stuck in a closet somewhere never to be seen or heard from again. That said, my internet is running through ICS on Windows XP, running on my brothers computer, and for those who haven't read some of my ranting threads, my brother doesn't know the first thing about computers (cleaning out his quarintine file the other day wiped out no less than thirty thousand viruses, yes, not a typo). As I sit here with
ping -t -w 10000 www.google.com open in another window and returning no less than 4000ms I think to myself "this is rediculous". I'm taking action.
"Warrior" is a used OmniTech computer with a (IIRC, I'll verify later) 866MHz Pentium 3 processor, a 10GB hard drive, 128 MB of RAM, a floppy drive and a CD drive. He's attached to an umbilical cord feeding him internet, through the hole in my wall (cross-reference, "A Hole in the Wall" thread), a IBM monitor purchased in 1996 and has been dragged out long past it's useful life (if you say it's blue-screen-ness (not BSOD, blue tint to the picture) is a life at all), and some ghetto Dell QuietKey PS2 keyboard I picked up for $7 when I bought Warrior. This sad piece of wtf is going to turn into nothing short of a dialup router -- I mean, how much shorter can you be?
The name Warrior is a reference to the World of WarCraft character class, generally used as the main-tank in dungeons. I think the name fits well because not only is he acting as a tank (firewall), preventing other players (computers) from coming under a lot of damage, but he is almost an absolute necessity for the group to function properly (the group isn't functioning properly right now, obviously).
I'm planning to install a hardware modem (when I come across any.. I believe his slots are PCI, so PM/reply if you have one for sale for cheap or less) and possibly a bigger hard drive (something I have laying around). From there I'll be running either FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Slackware, running the dialup connection through pppd and finding some way (or should I say making iago find me a way) to run a deamon behaving in likeness to Windows ICS, so that Warrior will direct requests for external connections to the hosts and allow connections to run through him, etc.
Also, he'll serve as an almost-practical reason for me to learn (more of) shell script and C/C++. I'd like to first of all create some small programs -- one to block access to certain machines (IE, when my brother or his machine acts up) and one to monitor / reconnect the dialup connection as I want to blame some of this behavior on my ISP (Netscape, owned by AOL, doesn't have that good of a reputation anyhow, really).
Wish me luck, and do you have any tips / warnings etc on this?
