[olug] Linux Recommendations?

[Dietz, John D.]

Irish:

	I have reason to believe that the College is going to be
implementing a VPN so that faculty/staff and certain students can remotely
access their computing systems.  The ISP that we are looking into is a local
wireless ISP that people tell me are easy to work with so long as you tell
them what you want to do before you do it.
	I personally want to get something like this setup so that I can
remotely and securely access our analytical chemical instrumentation and run
my samples remotely.
	The reason that VPN technology would need to be used is that the
College blocks all incoming and outbound connections that are used for these
Internet games.  A majority of the games that students are playing right now
do not allow you to change ports.  I think that it is based on some
sophisticated filtering software, but it is a tightly kept secret.
	Battle.Net is used for all games that are made by Blizzard
Entertainment (e.g. WarCraft, Diablo, StarCraft).
	Do you have any recommendations about a Linksys or NETGEAR device?  

Thanks,

John


John D. Dietz
144 Arborview Drive
Nebraska City, NE  68410-3302
Ph: (402) 873-9357
Fx: (402) 874-9572
Cell: (402) 659-3912
E-Mail: dietz_j at alltel.net / J-Dietz at cornellcollege.edu
WWW: http://people.cornellcollege.edu/J-Dietz

-----Original Message-----
From: olug-bounces at olug.org [mailto:olug-bounces at olug.org] On Behalf Of
OBrien, Timothy (Omaha Linux Users Group - OLUG)
Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 2004 11:41 PM
To: Omaha Linux User Group
Subject: RE: [olug] Linux Recommendations?

<quote who="Dietz, John D.">
>
> Vince,
>
> 	Thanks for the thought.  This idea did cross my mind, but as I am
> reading what I previously wrote, I noticed that I did not seem to include
> some important information.
> 	After talking to my roommates about the whole situation, it seems
> that they would like to have people connect into our network so that they
> can play LAN games without having to mess with things such as battle.net
> (most of these portal services are blocked on campus anyways).  That leads
> me to believe that I would need to setup a VPN.
> 	We can also connect into the campus network, probably through VPN.
> Would it be easiest to setup the client on the server and let everyone on
> the LAN connect to campus via the one VPN tunnel, or should each
> individual
> connect via their own VPN tunnel.  I am aware that there are some security
> issues with that idea, but this way, the server could control the
> bandwidth
> for the VPN connection.
> 	I was originally thinking of setting up a Linux server with a couple
> of NICs and configuring the server with some daemons for remote access.
> Not
> sure what you all think about this, and I would like to hear what people
> have done for situations like this if at all possible.
>
> Thanks,
>
> John
[snipped]


The easy answer is to purchase a router/switch combo, such as a linksys or
netgear to share out your connection. These will have the ability to
configure a DMZ and open a specific IP and port for whatever servers &
services your ISP will allow you to run. I'm also not sure what your
bandwidth limitations will be with your ISP, so what servers/services you
will be able to run without running out of your bandwidth limitations.

Yes, you can get a low end Pentium with two NICs and build your own router
- there are quite a few boot able floppy Linux distros exactly for this
purpose. Other individuals would also suggest OpenBSD for this purpose.
You will still need the switch to hardwire the router box to your other
systems. This option I would recommend to someone with an intermediate
experience & understanding of Linux/BSD.

Then you should set up a separate server running the gaming services you
want. But that is a separate conversation entirely, with a few threads in
the archives on the topic.


With either option I believe you could implement a VPN - but will the
college & your ISP allow such services running over their networks? You
need to investigate this further before investing in a hardware & software
solution; either by some social engineering or some hands on testing.


Question: what is battle.net used for? Why cant you coordinate between
friends for other servers to play on? gamespy works well for my needs in
this realm - though it is WinDoz only the last time I checked.



--
Timothy "Irish" O'Brien
Publicity & Social activities chairperson
Omaha Linux User's Group (OLUG)
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