How to make my LAN work?

[Harry Kuhman]

Sorry, I dont know much about networking. So I cannot tell you what my network setup is like. I know one thing that I use a switch to split my ethernet connection into 4 ports so that all of my four computers can access the internet. I dont have a home network setup between all my four computers...I know that for sure. Do you think a switch is good enough or a router is absolutely needed?

I'm rather surprised that a switch would work at all. It would mean that your ISP would have to provide multiple IP addresses for you. Some will, but will charge you extra for this each month, when a router can be had for a one time charge, often less than $10 arfter rebate in the U.S.

I also have no idea why you say that you don't have a hone network setup between your 4 computers. You previously used the term LAN (Local Area Network). Sounds like you do have a network if all computers get different IP addresses, but you may not have any resources shared.

I feel a router is much more important that just using a switch. And routers have become dirt cheap (if we were in the same city I would actually trade you a router for the switch); switches are handy behind the router if you have lots of computers, but they don't do NAT translation for you, they don't hand out addreses by DHCP, they don't take care of connecting to the service provider for you, and they don't provide a hardware firewall that is extremely inportant when putting any computer on a high speed connection, particularly when running windows. Several studies have shown that the typical computer attached to a high speed connection without a firewall will be infected in 4 minutes or less. People can't even reinstall from the disc and then try to go online to get the dubious security updates without getting infected without a hardware firewall.

With a router you have a firewall that stops incoming attacks before they get to the targeted computer. Since you didn't request anything from the attacker, the router has no why to know which computer to send unexpected incoming packets to and just drops them. Of course, you can deliberately forward packets to some system (for example, if you want to run your own web server), but unwanted and unexpected packets are discarded. You can. of course, still download bad files and infect yourself, but external exploits can be blocked. A software firewall, particlularly the awful Microsoft firewall but really any software firewall isn't enough). I also use a software firewall, but would never run on a high speed connection without a router.

I am not quite sure that I had problems with my netwok before running the netcardconfig. One thing that I can tell you for sure is that I couldnt open any webpage on mozilla firefox before I ran netcardconfig. It gave me a message saying that the link could not be found (something like that). But once I ran netcardconfig, I could then start opening webpages. So I am assuming that that was the problem.

I'm less certain of that, but it would be interesting to know. Next time that you reboot, before you run netcardconfig, try just clicking on one of the links in the Konquror windows that opens automatically (the initial text displayed is from a local file, but the links will take you to web pages). If the links work then you are on the web. If they do not then it would be interesting to open a shell and note what the ifconfig command tells you about your connection before and after the netcardconfig. I can't think of any reason why Knoppix wouldn't work with the automatic DHCP at boot time, but then work fine when you do nothing more than a netcardconfig and accept DHCP that time.