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Date:      Mon, 29 Apr 1996 23:41:41 -0500
From:      Benjamin Lewis <blewis@vet.vet.purdue.edu>
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Setting up a network at home
Message-ID:  <199604300441.XAA17509@localhost>

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Hello-

I've been running FreeBSD on my machine at home for quite a while.  I have
it connected to the internet through user PPP -> SLiRP, and I'm tremendously
happy with it.

I plan on purchasing another (more powerful) computer and installing
FreeBSD on that too.  Naturally, having two network-capable machines in
the same house just begs for a little in-home net of my own.  I've
played around with this sort of thing using various friends' and family
members' notebook computers and a serial connection, but I'm feeling a
bit more ambitious now and would like to set up an ethernet connection
between the computers.

I've read various man pages, Handbook entries, FAQ's and even Linux How-To's,
and that allowed me to do the kind of half-*ssed networking that I've
done to this point.  This time, I'd like to "Do It Right," but I just
don't know *exactly everything* that is required.  I've never worked 
with ethernet, so I'm pretty clueless in that area.

This is kind of a "vanity" thing, so I thought I'd make it a little more
complex than absolutely necessary in order to learn a bit more about this
stuff.

	host1: Gateway
		PPP  : 10.0.2.15
		ether: 10.0.2.16  (I understand that I need a separate IP
				    number for this, correct?)
		486DX33, ISA, 16mb.  Running 2.1.0-RELEASE
	host2: Workstation
		ether: 10.0.2.17
		(will be) Pentium or Cyrix 133, PCI/ISA, 16 or 32mb.
			Will run whatever the latest SNAP is when I
			purchase it.

host2 will occasionally run Win95 (ick!) since I'm tired of using TeX and
troff for stupid stuff like letters.  I thought I'd run a little name
server on host1 so that Win95 will be able to use hostnames instead of
IP numbers to refer to local hosts.  Does Win95 have an equivalent to
/etc/hosts that would eliminate this need?

I'm interested in finding out what the various config files should look
like, i.e. /etc/hosts, /etc/named/*, whatever else needs to be changed.
The Handbook is pretty clear about /etc/printcap, so I think I can figure 
that one out (it probably won't need to be complicated since I'll just
hook the printer up to host2 and I'm unlikely to want to print from 
host1).

>From what I've read so far, it looks like 10 Base-2 cabling is the way to
go for an el-cheapo net like this one.  On a side note, does anyone have
any recommendations for inexpensive ethernet cards to use in this 
application?

Like I said earlier, I've sort-of done this before using a serial 
connection, but I think it worked more by accident than design.

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

-Ben

-- 
Benjamin Lewis (blewis@vet.vet.purdue.edu)





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