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Comment by powvans | Hacker News Reader

Everything that's old is new again. Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux.

I needed to share a spectacularly slow DSL line with my college roommates. Soultion? Cobble together a router out of a cheap Pentium box, a PCI DSL modem, a 10mbit ISA nic, and Debian. Oh, and a couple of days of tinkering.

Ah ipchains. Those were the days.

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> Raise your hand if this is how you first got into Linux.

_raises hand_

In my case, I had my existing desktop PC and acquired another (used) one. Broadband hadn't yet made it to the rural area I lived and I got tired of moving the phone line back and forth between the two PCs.

I was able to find a pair of (very well supported) 3c509s and a crossover cable and managed to build my first network and get both machines online at the same time.

20+ years later, I'm still doing pretty much the same thing, progressing from ipfwadm to ipchains to iptables (on Linux) to pf (on OpenBSD). And, of course, the little dedicated machine flinging my packets nowadays is much faster than I could have ever imagined back then.

Oh man, ipfwadm, I completely forgot about that. I also now remember an ipmasq command, which google reminds me was kind of a wrapper around ipfwadm or ipchains, and I remember rebuilding my kernel over and over again (overnight!) to get the right combination of networking options. I also remember being very frustrated when I had to drop ipfwadm and learn ipchains for kernel 2.2, and drop ipchains and learn iptables for kernel 2.4!

Yep, so much relief when 2.6 came out and retained iptables!

I also recall doing the same sort of dance with linux kernel RAID, (0.90 vs md-style) and also encrypted block devices (cryptoloop to device mapper).

It's nice to remember and realize how stable and performant things are these days.

Yup, had a 486 running Slackware and a Pentium running Windows (FWG? 95?) and wanted to be able to share a single, always-on dial-up connection between them. I asked for a hub (with a 10Base2 BNC hookup and four 10BaseT ports) for my 15th or 16th birthday and found a 10Base2 ISA card for the 486 and a 10BaseT PCI card for the Pentium and went to town with ipchains, ppp, the whole nine yards. Good times.

In retrospect, I was very fortunate to have access to not only one but two computers, dial-up Internet, and a second phone line. It didn't seem like it at the time because my friends were getting ISDN lines. So many hours spent on IRC learning about Linux...

We were a Mac household, so to share the 56K dialup modem over our home LocalTalk network, I dusted off my Centris 660AV and configured the Mac's IP stack to do the routing using IPNetRouter[0] and wrote a couple of remote command AppleScripts so you could tell the modem to dial, hang up or return status.

The Macs of those days had RAM Disk support in the ROM so I copied the whole OS onto a RAM disk and unplugged the SCSI drive when it rebooted to create a nice solid-state router.

[0] http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipr_overview.html

I decided I should use OpenBSD as I'd heard it was really secure. This was 2000. The old machine it was going on had an unsupported NIC, so my first experience of OpenBSD was trying to install drivers from CD. It then literally took a week to compile everything. Happy days. I was so pleased with myself that I bought pufferfish stickers to put on it.

/me puts hand up.

Oh the tinkering.

56k POTS, IPChains, Them dodgy Intel NIC's, ADSL PPPoE, IPTables, Bonding, 802.1q VLANs, DSCP tc classes, Squid, Bind, MRTG, Cacti, IMQ Ingress Shaping kernel patch, Radius, Sendmail. I could go on for hours.

You break it? You fix it! Best self-schooling I'd ever had.

Debian? ipchains?

I assigned IP addresses, installed the Microsoft Internet Connection Sharing Service and called it a day :)

/me retracts the hand and runs away from flying rocks

That's two for flinching!

I scratch-built a minimal linux distro that had NE2000 support and ipchains. It fit on a single bootable floppy. Through high school, I sold the discs for $100 each, with the promise that it'd take whatever old junk computer you had kicking around and turn it into a reliable router. Paid for my first computer that way!

I remember setting up nat/firewall/routers for my office using cast off desktop machines, a linux on a floppy distro, and a couple of 3com network cards. They may have even been 486 machines, since I was taking what I could get. The IT people were impressed with the security of being able to flip the write protect on the floppy. And the speed, once it was running completely from memory. Less so on the process to make a change.

At the time, they were running out of ip addresses because every desktop was allocated a public ip.

Same here, though we did it with FreeBSD, not Linux.

If you've never tried to "make buildworld" on FreeBSD on a Pentium 75, you can try it next time you have a spare couple days.

Haha, yeah I shared a dial up connection for a bit of all things. Then when my family got @Home cable internet it was much better for that.

I started with a Linux, but eventually moved on to FreeBSD. I learned more about network technologies mucking around with an edge router then I ever did in my CS networking class.

It's been an interesting decade.

Yeah, one of the first linux distros I touched was IPcop.

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