USB Network device

[Spaz]

The short:

Could someone suggest a USB NIC to act as the public (or private) side NIC for a linux firewall box? Would like one with relatively easy driver support, or preferably one already supported by a recent Linux version.


The long:
I've got a perfect little linux box but for one thing - no expansion slots. (It's one of those -tiny- all inclusive PCs, has a gig of RAM and a 1.4ish GHz CPU.. best of all, it's completely silent)

Problem is that it only has an internal 10/100 NIC and some USB ports. So I look around and find many USB NICs that claim Linux support, but further searching shows that this support can be spotty.

I tinkered with RH8's hardware listing but could not find any matches by various flavors of Network, NIC, Card, Adapter and USB. I started searching for model numbers of USB NICs but after 10 or so I gave up.

[BlueAdept]

I have fooled with several of the usb nic devices. As you said, they were spotty.

You need to have pegasus turned on.

The Belkin F5D5050 did seem to work under RH 8. But I had issues with my video card so went back to RH 7.3 and dumped the USB for a mini-pci card.

[S_B_R]

It's not ideal but you can use an alias NIC.

[Spaz]

BA - How much tinkering did you have to do to get it to work?

Found this... comments for an available USB NIC. The things are so inexpensive I'm going to probably just try them until I find one that works.

[Cryonic]

The problem with USB NICs is their limited speed. A USB 1.1 interface is only capable of sending data at a paltry rate of 1.5 - 12Mb/s. Now that might be fast enough for your Internet Connection, but you will have some CPU overhead to process the data on the bus and that rate is, to me, very unacceptable for a LAN. I would saturate that just streaming a single video.

[Spaz]

The only thing this PC ever will do for it's life is be a network firewall/internet sharing device.

I wonder if it would be better to get a USB DSL Modem - directly connected to the linux box and then share that over the PCI Nic. Would SEQ still work? Hrm...

[Cryonic]

Only if Linux has support for the modem.

[fryfrog]

someone already suggested it, but why not try using aliases?


make eth0 your internet connection and define eth0:0 as your internal connection. the down side is that your live and internal network would be on the same hub, but i don't see why it wouldn't work.

keep in mind i have never done this, but i would configure eth0 how ever you normally would using your os and network settings. then, once that is all working create an alias named eth0:0 with an internal ip like 10.0.0.1 / 255.255.255.0. now, you just need to make sure you specify the correct device for what ever you are running, like a dhcpd or something. same with ipchains and stuff too.

[BlueAdept]

Originally posted by Spaz
BA - How much tinkering did you have to do to get it to work?

Found this... comments for an available USB NIC. The things are so inexpensive I'm going to probably just try them until I find one that works.

With RH 8, it picked right up on the USB ethernet (at least on the one that I mentioned).