Mark Allison wrote: > Thanks guys - I've looked for wireless gigabit switches and they do > exist but seem to be designed for racks and not home use. I'll have a > think and will probably implement what you have suggested. It would > have been nice to have a transparent proxy with a dansguardian filter > over wireless, but it looks too prohibitively expensive for home use. > I would prefer not to have to buy another two devices (gigabit swtich > and wireless AP) to implement the solution. > > Mark. >
What you can do put your wireless router on a different subnet to the main network. For this you will need two network cards in your server. Connect one card from the server to the router (give it say a 192.168.0.x subnet) and disable DHCP on the router, connect the other NIC (the gigabit NIC) to the gigabit switch and give it another subnet (I set mine on a different subnet, I used 10.0.0.x). Then set the server up with dansguardian/squid to do transparent proxying and dhcp/dns and point the server's gateway to the router IP address. Then connect the gigabit switch to the router. This way as long as the machines are either set statically to use the same subnet as the server (and use the server as the gateway) then they should be forced to go through the server to connect to the internet. I did something similar when I had a Vonage router. I disabled DHCP on my Netgear wireless router, connected one port from the wireless router to the WAN connection on the Vonage box (which the LAN side of it was on a different subnet to the wireless router) and then connected one of the 4 LAN ports on the Vonage box back to the wireless router. The Vonage box was taking care of DHCP/DNS/QoS so any machines connecting were looking at the Vonage router as the gateway (which in turn was looking at the wireless router's IP as it's gateway). I suppose the wireless in the wireless router works as another network port and you could probably transfer any old protocol (TCP/IP, IPX/SPX etc) over it. Hope this makes sense. You're probably looking at about £20 to £30 for an 8 port Gigabit switch, oh and enough cables to reach to the desktops (I'm lucky in the respect that my other half is fairly understanding about the 3 CAT5 cables running up from the lounge to the loft through the ceiling and kids bedroom). Rob -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.kubuntu.org/UKTeam/
