I've just had a fairly successful run-in with one of those boot-from-floppy gateway thingies, so I thought I'd do a quick blurb about it. Freesco is a "free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 3 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 2 modems". With a cheap budget system that I put together (thanks to sprayNwipe, Raraku and Psycho! for their generous contributions :) and some brief messing around with dirty IRQs and a 30 second boot-time question answering session with Freesco and I had a box that connected seamlessly to the Optus@Home network and provided an internal DHCP server for local clients as well as network address translation. Definitely recommended for people wanting to set up a nice cheap'n'easy home network.

Yeah , it is pretty good, one of these days ill get around to using it at home.


Does this mean you dont want that 133 fixed trog?

Yeh, I got it all working :) thanks for your offer though eds :)

Woo !

I hope the gear I gave you worked! I knew the HDD did but I wasn't so sure about those ISA NIC cards !

It was odd, trog asked me out for a drink, then the next thing I remember I'm in a bathtub full of ice with my kidneys and a p133 missing! What the hell happened?!?!

does it have a firewall ?

i tried to get freesco working with optus@home, without any success though.

So i'm just using smoothwall now, heh :)

eds, edit your sig and make your line smaller, its screwing with the resizing of the page, and generaly annoying me

Yes. It has a firewall. It's basically a stripped down linux kernel.

The question is, does it work easily with BPA? Is it easy to get bpalogin working with it?

i guess ill find out tonight.....
u can get a linux bpa client cant you ?

Yes. I'm just wondering if you can fit the client on the boot disk or not.

heh, BPA

eds, edit your sig and make your line smaller, its screwing with the resizing of the page, and generaly annoying me

how bout replace it with <hr>

Yes freesco aint too shabby...

uptime:
up 49 days, 18:53, 1 user, load average: 0.67, 0.24, 0.14

When i first had optus installed here, a friend lent me a old pentium with 32meg of ram.

I installed eigerstein (from linux router project)... it runs off a floppy, so the computer didnt have hdd, or cd, just nics, vga fdd and a mobo with some ram!

the good thing about running off a floppy is its inpenitrable cause its all in disk cache (or so I was told) and my netspeed went up!

the only bummer was when you wanted to use things like file-sharing it was a bitch, no one could dl off you, no one could send you stuff, unless you specifically opened ports in the cfgs.... I had it up for 4 months and it crashed twice, once was due to a blackout!

I think the webpage was lrp.c0wz.com but I couldn't access it. You can find it around thou!

(update) o... look here

The question is, does it work easily with BPA? Is it easy to get bpalogin working with it?

No, it doesnt.

how ever if you go Here you will find a simular project with a built in BPA login.

Term, one of these days ill fix it, delete it if you want, i dont care

Really? the bpa login client is only 33kbytes, I woulda thought it would fit on the floppy. If I could be bothered, I'd test it, but.. I can't.

Eds is the source of the uber wide threads?

Go and f***ing fix the line now eds you arrogant little f***, you've been asked nicely

AHahahahahahaah, your just pissed off cause im 17 and your what, 20 something, and i have a job in IT and your a " Freelancer" ( Unemployed )

Eds - incorrect!!

It CAN run offa bpa, cause the guy taht lent me computer was using it. he said he had issues with script, but he got it too work

I decided to give this thing a shot with my old trashey p100, with no hard drive, and im glad to say, i have sucesfully removed all the lingering cobwebs from its case.

works pretty damm spifty so far, no problems with games or irc/icq, only thing, you gota DNS lookup WWW and MAIL for those optus users (yush, i forgot)

but one little anoyance, i got a webserver setup on my computer so i can test the website im working on, other people can access it via my intenret net IP address using port forwarding, but i cant seam to get to it localy, (using 192.168.0.2 wors fine tho) no biggie, just wondering if anyone knew a way around it?

but other than that, works fine, i have yet to test a long strech of gaming, but so far damm good.

Blarg, me fail linux 101.

Im trying to set it up so i can remote dial in via a modem, i have the primary isp link setup, and lan works fine. but i cant seam to get the modem to work properly to allow outside calls in.

I have set everything up to the best of my knowledge, but i get this error message, maybe there is the light chance that somsone has tried to do this before.

Sep  2 00:23:46 - /bin/mgetty: Can't init modem /dev/cua0 with ATZ

Sep  2 00:23:51 - login: 7 LOGIN FAILURES ON cua0, scuzzy

Sep  2 00:24:01 - chat[1364]: Can't restore terminal parameters: I/O error

Sep  2 00:24:01 - /bin/mgetty: Can't init modem /dev/cua0 with ATZ

Sep  2 00:24:04 - chat[1390]: Failed

Sep  2 00:24:04 - chat[1390]: Can't restore terminal parameters: I/O error

Sep  2 00:24:16 - /bin/mgetty: Can't init modem /dev/cua0 with ATZ

 

update:
damm usless modem, keeps giving me this when i reset it...

Sep  2 01:23:43 - chat[376]: Can't restore terminal parameters: I/O error

Sep  2 01:23:45 - chat[434]: Failed

Sep  2 01:23:45 - chat[434]: Can't restore terminal parameters: I/O error

scuzzy. no u dont haveto do the dns thingies...

use dns suffix in the tcp/ip setting of your clients

eg. my node 4 cable is kelvn1.qld.optushome.com.au
so when ever i goto www it translates into www.kelvn1.qld.optushome.com.au

so theres a setting called DNS SUFFIX in tcp/ip settings. add to that your node.

ie my computer is C049675.kelvn1.qld.optushome.com.au

make sense ?

& yes i use coyotelinux. works GREAT!