On Fri, Jul 09, 2004 at 01:07:38PM -0700, alan wrote: > On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 chicks@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > We're dealing with a stupid cable company in KY that won't assign extra > > IP's with each IP having it's own MAC. Ultimately the machines are going > > to be sitting behind a FC2 firewall, but we need to get the IP's somehow. > > One solution would be to drop 5 NIC's in a box, but that seems pretty > > stupid to me. Is there any way to have a single NIC respond to more than > > 1 MAC address? > > I don't understand why you need multiple mac addresses. > > Maybe if we understood the goal of what you were trying to accomplish, we > might be able to help better. > > If you just want to have multiple machines behind the firewall, just use > NAT and non-routable IP addresses (192.168.x.x). If you bought five IP addresses you can install a small multi-port switch and plug each of the five different boxes into that switch which in turn is connected to the cable, DSL, whatever line. Each system can then authenticate and connect to your ISP. If you connect one Linux machine it can masquerade or NAT for the machines behind it and deliver packets to/from machines behind it. None of these requires multiple IP addresses from the ISP or multiple MAC addresses. I doubt that there is any way to get additional bandwidth unless the individual boxes are werry werry slow. On todays Internet I like an inexpensive Linksys or Netgear box as a first line of defense for home systems. My girl friend has no clue about system admin and this helps. It gives you the extra ports of a network switch and also a simple web interface for managing a firewall, even dhcp if you want. Download the manual (pdf) for the two or three products that looks interesting to you. Compare, contrast... then buy. -- T o m M i t c h e l l /dev/null the ultimate in secure storage.
