The server has been up for 22 days now, usage is running low and there are no stupid services running by default to bog my server down.

I rewired my network with Cat6 and I am seeing some nice gigabit speeds.  Having multiple switch jumps is kind of a pain though.  I probably need a 24 port gigabit router so that the traffic could run at maximum through-put.

The server has also handled 55GB inbound and 37GB outbound traffic in last 22 days :P.

I work from home and I often have to connect to my workplace network.  I work from several different machines from within my home network and hate setting up VPN on each of these machines.

I recently setup a linux server/router at home.  To solve this problem I configured a VPN connection to my workplace on this machine by following the instructions here.  After playing around with my firewall settings and setting up the route so that all traffic destined for my workplace’s subnet is routed over the ppp interface, I was able to ping my workplace machines from the linux box.  I was, however, still not able to reach my work machine from other machines on my network.

To solve this problem I figured that I needed to NAT the address before sending the packet over to the workplace network.  This can be done very easily with iptables:

/sbin/iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o ppp0 -j SNAT --to 192.168.23.0

Here ppp0 is the PPP VPN Link interface and 192.168.23.0 is the workplace’s subnet.  Once I did this all of my machines on the network were able to ping and connect to my workplace machines, which is sweeeeet!! :)

I configured my VPN connection to start on boot and setup all these routing and firewall settings on startup. So I will now have a persistent connection to my workplace from home.  With some DNS settings I can now easily access my workplace from any computer in my home network.

HTH

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Now that I have a dedicated server with DHCP address assignment, I didn’t want the 665 to run as a router.  It would have created its own subnet (which its not really capable of doing unless the uplink is a WAN link) which could have complicated things.  I wanted all my computers on a single subnet.  Getting a different router was not really an option because DIR 665 is awesome IMO.

I therefore wanted the 665 to run as a wireless Access Point (AP).  After digging around on the internet for a while I found that the support for this router as AP was dropped in firmware version 1.04 (the current version is 1.21 btw).  However, there is a way to get this router to work as an Access Point:

In the router’s Admin web interface change the router’s internal IP to a valid static IP (this is the IP where you’d be accessing the router admin web interface; or not change it if there’s no conflict) and disable DHCP.  Then, reset all firewall/nat rules.  Once this is done, plug your 665 into your home network’s switch.  Important thing to note here is that when you plug your router in, plug the wire into one of the switch ports on the 665 and NOT the WAN port.  Leave the WAN port un-plugged. 

That should do it!

Now try renewing your IP lease on one of your wireless devices (if you’re using a mac, just restart it) and you should get the IP assigned to you by the DHCP server on your network and not the 665.  You can now ping the server, access the internet etc.  You’ve essentially turned your DIR 665 into an Access Point.

HTH

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