Verizon DSL

[Brewster]

Well my dad finnally swithched from AOL to DSL. We should be getting the modem in a few days. However, i'm a little unsure about what to do when i get it. Right now I have a 5 port switch in my basement with 3 macs and a pc throughout the house. Can i just hook up the DSL modem to the swith or do I have to buy a router? Then what do I do? Also I have Mac OS X on one of the computers so will ot work? Please help me! Thanks.

[DominikHoffmann]

You will need a router like the one you can buy at Best Buy for $30 (after rebate), a D-Link DI-604. The reason is that the cable modem will only provide you with one IP address exposed to the Internet. If you have 4 hosts at your dad's house without a router there will be the potential for serious conflicts between what your ISP provides and what the host would want to use.

The router will do the following,

1) share the one IP address among the 4 hosts on your home LAN,

2) by linking, but not combining, your LAN and the Internet, decide whether packets need to get across the link (out to the Internet) or should stay within the LAN (communication between local hosts),

3) dynamically and automatically assign IP addresses to the hosts on your LAN (via the DHCP protocol), in order to avoid address conflicts, and

4) provide a firewall between your LAN and the Internet, which possesses very limited configurability, but therefore requires next to no maintenance.

You would want to connect the uplink port of your switch with one of the LAN ports on the router. You would then want to point the browser running on one of the LAN hosts to http://192.168.1.1/ (exact address may vary, depending on router manufacturer), in order to configure your router according to the instructions of the ISP and the router's manufacturer.

The WAN (wide-area network), or Internet, side of the router will look to your dad's ISP like it is the single computer intended by them to be connected to the cable modem. Follow the ISP's instructions for configuring that one computer and set up the WAN portion of the router analogously.

What operating system runs on the hosts on your dad's LAN is immaterial, as long as they are able to access a TCP/IP network, which Windows and both Mac OS and Mac OS X among many others can.

[Brewster]

great! thanks so much!