How-To Stabilise your DNS addresses

@Bruce M.: If your internet is working ok, & you don't have to do anything to maintain the working all right situation, then I would forget about it.

It may very well be that this is how it works with your cable company & Linux (Ubuntu at least). Cable is a bit different.

Your not having a router brings the question to my mind though, of what security does your ISP provide, if any? (My ignorance of cable is talking here.) When we have an ADSL modem/router, the router usually incorporates NAT or SPI which are effective firewall systems.

So I wonder if your not having a router means that the cable company is providing this (or some other) form of protection at its end?

Is your IP the same if you have a look at it from this site:

http://whatismyipaddress.com/

& you can also use this site to test if your computer is protected somehow:

http://www.pcflank.com/scanner1.htm

It will also show your computers IP address which is good for verification. :-)

If you find that your computer is unprotected then I suggest that you investigate setting up a firewall (firestarter) on your machine, if you have more than one machine you may enjoy setting up IPCop on a cheap (near enough to free these days) PII headless box. IPCop is really quite easy to set up & works like a dream.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Bruce M.

Checked out whatsmyip.com and it reports the same IP as ifconfig.

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Based on that, it's almost certain that your modem is just a modem, with no router built in.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by handy

Your not having a router brings the question to my mind though, of what security does your ISP provide, if any? (My ignorance of cable is talking here.) When we have an ADSL modem/router, the router usually incorporates NAT or SPI which are effective firewall systems.

So I wonder if your not having a router means that the cable company is providing this (or some other) form of protection at its end?

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Based on my understanding of cable (which is probably somewhat outdated), the biggest security risk is data traveling between you and the ISP. I had a co-worker once who was a bit of a black hat, and he claimed that it was relatively easy to sniff your neighbor's cable internet traffic. A router wouldn't protect against this. The only defense is adequate encryption. But that situation might have been remedied. There was a time when it was quite simple to intercept wireless traffic, but these days many wireless networks have made that much more difficult, so I imagine the same might be true with cable. At any rate, back when I had cable, I never was able to see anyone else's traffic (I wasn't trying to snoop; I was just trying to see if I was vulnerable to snoops). If you run etherape as root and see anyone else's traffic, beware.

As far as NAT goes, NAT doesn't necessarily increase your security. For example, a default Ubuntu installation has no external ports open; therefore, NAT won't help it security-wise. Of course, most people install additional software, some of which might open up ports. There are a number of web-based port-scanning tools. It would be smart to run one of them, and make sure that any open ports are ports you expect to be open (such as port 80 for a web server or port 22 for an SSH server), and make sure that you follow adequate security procedures with the programs that are responsible for those ports. Where NAT can be a help is if you want to do something in a trusted environment (such as file-sharing) but don't want to expose those ports to the public. With only one computer, though, running such software in the first place would be foolish. So if you only have one computer, you don't really need a router as long as you're smart security-wise.

Thanks for the info' mssever. :-)

I use IPCop/Copfilter on an old PIII with my ADSL modem/router in bridge mode;
it gives great security & better speed, plus a few other enhancements/services, like being able to run Privoxy & ClamAV (not that I need a virus checker :-)) without slowing down my internet throughput at all.

The computer cost me $5- at the tip, & it uses little electricity, the HDD rarely ever needs to spin up, the CPU rarely does more than idle & this box has a low power PSU, so as far as PIII's go it is about as good as it gets I think. Though PII's are better, when one turns up at the tip I'll grab it. :-)

I disabled ipv6 in terminal using

echo "blacklist ipv6" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

but it didn't help my slow speeds. Other laptops here are getting normal wireless and the slow machine has fast speed when booted into vista, but not in ubunti 8.10. i want to re-enable ipv6 since disabling did not help and wifi was working well on other routers previously...

Can some one tell me how to re enable ipv6.... cant find how to anywhere though searching? I've tried editing via
gksudo gedit /exc/modprobe.d/blacklist
but the list seems to be blank

Thanks

Quote:

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Originally Posted by guberone

gksudo gedit /exc/modprobe.d/blacklist

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Have you tried

Code:

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gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

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?

Thank you. I was able to remove the black list line and ipv6 is back on.

Thanks for helping a noob find his way.

I'm going to try messing with this again another day, but if you can think of any reason as to why wifi is slow in comparison to to other laptops let me know. I'm on a Belkin wirless router, don't know the model # as I'm in my office and the router is located in my landlords unit, but I'd guess its and older piece of crap.

He ran a wire from the router into my office and ubuntu won't connect to that at all, but LAN works at home. Maybe that's a clue to the wifi problem.