I went back to try to setup the ADSL connection for the business whose IT I look after.

This time, with the ADSL modem/wireless AP I bought the other day.

I installed the extra network card in the linux firewall machine I built, and then I went about physically setting up the modem/AP.

I booted the firewall back up after installing the extra card, connected to it, and found that I didn't have an eth1 for some reason. Annoying.

I tried loading the module for the card manually, but then found that there was no module compiled. That would explain why it didn't come up.

Luckily the kernel source was still on the machine, so I reconfigured it, and then just compiled the modules, and I manually copied the module I needed across, and loaded it, and the interface came up, that was a good start.

I connected it to the modem/AP, and went about setting up the modem settings, username/password for the account etc, but found that it wouldn't connect.

I'd gone there with my mate, who resells ADSL, and sets it up, and I queried the settings he was telling me, because the password is part of the customer's name, and their street, and something else, and what he was telling me wasn't right.

He was telling me the wrong street name, so once we put that in correctly, it connected.

I configured the routing on the firewall machine, and then connected to it with my laptop, and it seemed to be working.

I modified the networking script to enable IP masquerading on boot up, and then that was working from the desktop PC, but I had no DNS for some reason.

I realised it was because I hadn't updated the settings in the DHCP configuration file, to reflect the new ISP.

I fixed that up, but when I tried to restart DHCP, it failed, and then I realised that it was because there was now an extra interface in the machine, with an IP range not defined in the DHCP config, so I had to modify the startup script for DHCP, to only run on the internal interface, not the one connected to the ADSL modem.

That was all working, so I installed Thunderbird on the machine, and configured it to work with the IMAP server on the firewall machine.

Firefox had been corrupted on the machine for some reason, so I reinstalled that, and it was fine.

I rebooted the firewall machine again, to check that the config was all ok, but the second card didn't load up. I edited the modules.conf, and added in a line to load the kernel module for it.

I rebooted again, and this time the card came up, but it wasn't configured. I'd just been setting it up manually with ifconfig, and hadn't remembered to put the settings into the config file.

I fixed up the interfaces file, and then rebooted again. I was getting close, it was almost right this time.

There was no default route, so the traffic wasn't going out the ADSL. I modified the interfaces file again, added in the route, and rebooted again.

It came up all looking fine, but it wouldn't NAT traffic for some reason. I realised that the changes I'd made to the startup script to enable IP forwarding at boot weren't taking effect, because I'd not defined the function in the network options file.

I fixed that up, and rebooted again. Now it was all ok. Strangely, from my laptop connected to the AP, then to the firewall, on the external interface, I couldn't connect to the PC on the internal interface.

I suppose that's not too bad, since it is supposed to be acting as a firewall, but then I found that the desktop wouldn't connect out either.

The IP chains rule for NAT had gone away for some reason, so I added it into the network startup script, along with enabling IP forwarding.

I setup a port forward on the ADSL modem, to the firewall machine, for SSH, so that I can login remotely, and that worked.

I tried to setup the dyndns support in the ADSL modem, but it kept coming back with something about "strange response from server". I figure that updating the firmware in the modem would fix that, but it's not a priority.

After making sure it was all working, I spent a little while on the desktop machine.

The hard drive is pretty much full on it, so I went through and cleaned up what I could, and removed programs that weren't necessary on there.

I tested the applications that need to work across the internet, using a VPN, and they worked, so that was good.

There's another PC there, that needs to be connected to the ADSL, I checked that it had a network card in it, so I could connect the wireless bridge I bought, when it turns up.

I installed the modem that I'd removed from the firewall on this machine as a temporary setup.

I need to rebuild the desktop machine at some point, to fix up the issues of disk space, because of the partitioning of the machine.