I currently share my AOL 56k connection through wingate to 5 other computers. What is was wondering is whether smoothwall has any advantages over wingate, if not what is the point in dedicating a whole computer? Sorry if I'm being ignorant, I'm new to networking.
LOL, what are you doing sharing a 56k connection with 5 computers anyways, bahahaha especially an AOL one rofl
First off I like AOL because I can always connect, and once connected it usually stays that way for upwards of 20 hours! The only ISP I have found that comes close to that is demon, which is more than twice the price. AOL is fast too. The only problem is the software, which I can learn to live with. About the 5 computers thing, usually only 1 machine is accessing the net at any one time so it's not a problem.
I don't know that anyone has been 100% sucessful in getting Linux to connect to A-o-Hell. They made a lot of changes lately, like assigning a real IP address to dialups so things may have changed dramatically for the Linux world. And I've never even considered using them so i can't say. However to make a good comparison between the two you'd have to be more specific as to what you were looking to improve on.... security - get windoze off the front end! WinGate has been sucessfully cracked time and time again, very poorly written. Performance - Linux will win hands down even over a lowly dialup. Ineternet game play and the like follows suit as well... Now since you are using a dialup to serve all of your machines...you may want to put a caching proxy server at or near the front line. This would be a definate help. Funny thing is i have a OC3 at my disposal for the office but living way out in the boonies I have two options analog dialup or a frac Frame Relay circuit (at $950/month...no thanks!) so i have learned how to deal with dialups... two lines and mlppp works out better than isdn (which of course i can't get anyhows). But that with a caching proxy up front and things run a lot faster. Not sure if this will even be of any help...but if the Linux box can authenticate and establish the ppp sesseion - I'd say get windoze off the front line... my $.02 worth on it.
I forgot to mention that I would consider switching to Demon from AOL and paying the extra, if having a linux router would be enough of a benefit. 56k is my only option apart from ISDN which offers very little speed benefit but much higher costs. ADSL and cable are both unavailable here. Security isn't much of an issue, but speed is. Also any linux system has to be easy to get to grips with as I don't have any practical linux experience.
security wasnt a big priority her either until sone A** in Virginia decided that my IP needed a dose of Virii. My cable connection was going nuts and my father(the ISC comp)'s computer had half a dozen viruses dropped on it before we reformatted and put zone alarm on it. ok ya its zonealarm, but hey were cheap and dont want to invest in a linksys router yet...
AOL doesn't do anything for your " street cred " - lol. umm, i would go with smoothwall for the security.
I have one thing to say OUCH Well you will never be happy with your internet speed, when I first got adsl I was amazed but not now. Then when I started work which has 100 mbps connection I thought wow this is great, I now moan about taking 20 mins to download all 3 redhat iso's. Maybe I'm an ungrateful bugger.
heh, i agree on the bandwidth thing personally I'd rate smoothwall over wingate, its easier to configure, the people who run it are passionate and really it needs a lower spec machine.