Update: this page was originally written to describe our set-up back in 1998. It worked pretty well, but there have been some changes since then. My buddy Martin still uses a Linux gateway to share a high-speed internet connection -- but he's on Roger's Wave now.

About a year ago, Sympatico introduced some software called the "connection manager" that you have to run on your computer in order to get online. It wasn't supported on Linux, which prompted the switch to Rogers cable modem. Everything worked ok with Rogers. Apparently the Sympatico Connection Manager is now supported on Linux and there are people using it to run LAN's in their homes.

I was living in another shared house for a while and set up a LAN there. We used Roger's cable modem as well, but we used a Windows 98 box as the gateway. This was way easier to set up than a Linux gateway. We just used Sygate, a piece of software that let's you share an internet connection among several computers. It runs like a charm on Windows and is a total breeze to set up. If you want to save yourself a lot of headaches getting set up, just use Sygate on a Windows box.

Here's the original document... in case you want the whole story.

Welcome to my most recent page, which is about Erwin. Erwin is a computer set up as a Linux box which resides in our living room.  It is the center of a computer network which we have established in our house, complete with high speed Internet access 24 hours a day! 

Isn't that expensive? Not really! We didn't spend much money on it at all, and it wasn't terribly difficult to do. 

In fact, Erwin is a salvaged 486 computer, fitted out with several old hard drives by one of my room-mates, Martin, complete with two ethernet cards: one attached to our hub and one attached to our 1 megabit modem from Sympatico. 

The hub allows each of us (Hans, Martin, and Darren - that's me) to connect our computers to Erwin and to the network. The 1 megabit modem gives us a high speed Internet connection which is active all the time. 

Erwin runs Redhat Linux 5.2.  This is an excellent and stable operating system although it is somewhat complex to begin with.  And Linux is FREE. We use IPV4 masquerading in Linux to allow all four computers in our network to access the Internet simultaneously! It's like we each have our own separate high-speed connection to the Internet all the time. Very cool. 

The 1 megabit modem connection is a new service from Bell Canada known as Sympatico High Speed Edition. The one megabit modem, made by Nortel, is based on ADSL technology and is still in the 'experimental' stage... it is not available everywhere, and there are occassional bugs. But generally it is quite impressive. It is certainly fast enough for our needs and it is also more economical than other options.