[SLUG] Optushome success

[Jamie Honan <jhonan@nospam.mpx.com.au>]

Just confirming that I've been able to set up optus@nospam.home
with a linux router / masquarade box.

Much information at http://metrak.com/OaH/OaH-Linux.html, however
I did things a little differently :)

* used coyote linux http://www.coyotelinux.com which is
based on LRP - linux router project. docs:
http://lrp.c0wz.com/dox/lrphowto.html

(Thanks predator for this tip).

This is a floppy based disto. You build the floppy on your working
linux system. My router was an old 486 that someone threw out.

Physically configuring the network cards (irqs + io's) took the
longest.

* For installation I had a sacrificial windows 95 machine. The installers
let me keep the previous network card as the interface and existing
netscape. As this was on old machine without much disk space this helped a
lot. I asked them not to bother with all the plugins (these are all on the
CD) and they were quite happy. Obviously this depends on the mood and
disposition of the personalities involved (yours and theirs).

* After installing, there are three bits of information you need.
The host name (careful of Ohs and zeros), the dns server, and the
domain name. I used winipcfg to determine the last two.

I remade the coyote boot floppy with the host name. Coyote
'knows' about @nospam.home 'hostnames' and has questions for
these when building your floppy boot disk.

* The optus network is premised on picking up your domain name at dhcp.
This is tricky if you want a different internal domain name. Optus
software is configured with single word host names like 'mail', 'news',
'proxy', which combine with the dhcp allocated domain like
'brose1.nsw.optushome.com.au'. Thus your mail server might be
'mail.brose1.nsw.optushome.com.au'.

I haven't figured out a way of propogating a domain name change through
my LAN (other than having the coyote run dhcpd : which it is very easily
configured to do), so I just copied down the name
"brose1.nsw.optushome.com.au" and used full names for mail and news
pickups.

It actually will cause a little grief to naive customers when they
want to pick up their mail from work, as they'll need the fqdn.
I don't think they've thought this through 100%.

All in all things have worked out quite well. Longest part
was configuring the LAN cards and confusion over the email
password. The initial password is in upper case, the installers
wrote it down as lower.

Support is, as always, slow. For example, changing email passwords is
through a very slow phone call.

Link speed is very good. I have objectively measured it as 'pleasantly
fast'.

Jamie

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