I suppose this is more of a learning/curiosity question which came up by my step son wanting to multihome a single nic in his WinXP machine instead of buying a cheap router. That way he would have some programming capability he wouldn't have with a NetGear. ( He is a Win Networking type)
But then I got to thinking: There are lots of Computers on a PCI card which would run Linux. But they mostly only have one ethernet port.
So If you multihomed the ethernet you could have a truly inexpensive but highly programmable router in a desktop pc.
You'd have to write your own firewall scripts but I do that anyway. The private LAN packets would bounce off your ISP. Wrong MAC.
That would double your outgoing bandwidth consumption, but you don't use much outgoing anyway. Or would a switch isolate the ISP's by MAC? I can see where this is insecure, technically speaking, but only as far as the ISP's gateway. Maybe?
It's just interesting.
It could be fun to play with something like this, but fundamentally, without two NICs, your computer is still connected directly to the internet via physical ethernet to your upstream link (cable/DSL modem?).
Note that a switch will do *NOTHING* to protect you in this environment, unless you use a high-end switch that has built-in filtering (ie something rack-mount that probably cost several thousand $$$). While all switches do "filter" by MAC (ie they don't transmit data not destined for a machine on that port), this isn't filtering in the security sense (ie allowing *ONLY* traffic to/from this MAC on this port). Remember, switches are designed to *CONNECT* multiple networking devices. :-)
If you want to play with this, which I think would be a lot of fun, and can be very educational, pick up an old PC and a couple of NICs. If you don't have any ancient PC hardware lying around, check the classifieds and used electronics stores in your area. You should be able to put together a system for $50-100, which is about what you'd pay for a "black box". Remember you don't need a HDD, you only need 16-32 Meg RAM, and you can use a 10 MBit link for your upstream connection (and for the internal link as well, if you don't need 100 MBit for other reasons, like a non-switching hub on the internal net).
You can even use old 486 systems and ISA cards if you can find any. Even the used shops around here simply pitch stuff that old.
-- Charles Steinkuehler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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