Acill wrote:
Since I have been having so many problems getting MiamiDX stable with my cable modem I have decided to get a router when I return home from the gulf.
I have an SMC Barricade router between my LAN and the cablemodem. It gets an IP address from the cable company's server. That becomes the routers external IP address. It has a built-in DHCP server (that I don't use, I have static IP's in the 192.168.123.xxx range on the LAN side) for the LAN side. When I was using the DHCP server in the router, I set Miami's gateway and DHCP server address to the routers LAN-side address (192.168.123.254 in my case), set the network mask to the value in the manual and that was it. The routers DHCP server returns a private address (ie 192.168.123.100) and uses IP/NAT to funnel traffic to the right machine.
The nice thing (other than having more than one computer on one public IP address) is that the router handles all the authentication with the network, be it PPPoE, DHCP or whatever. Also, you can set your local machines to static IPs if you want to.
There are some down sides:
You'll have more cables.
You'll possibly have more wall-warts. :-(
You might want to spend money on more computers!
