Guest.Visitor
01-01-1995, 02:00 AM
Steven You do not need a PC NOS to connect your lan to the Internet. You need TCP/IP installed on all of your computers. You will also need a router and a firewall. Microsoft has a software version of a these that run on an NT server. But all you need is a router and firewall from CISCO or some other hardware vendor. The first thing to do when connecting your lan to the Internet is to make sure you are using a private TCP/IP address range. TCP/IP computers use the TCP/IP mask to determine if the address they are sending messages to is for a computer on the local network or a computer on a remote network. If it is on a remote network, it sends the message to a gateway. When you connect to the Internet, your local network must not have a network number that is in use by anyone on the Internet. For example, yahoo uses TCP/IP address 204.71.177.35. If your TCP/IP mask is 255.255.255.0 and you use 204.71.177.# as your local network number, you will never be able to connect to yahoo as your computers would always think that any TCP/IP addresses starting with 204.71.177 is a local number. Public numbers are used on the Internet and private numbers are not used on the Internet. The range of private numbers is: 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 When you connect your lan to the Internet you will be assigned a block of public numbers by your internet service provider. You could then assign each of your computers one of the public addresses. However, this means your computers can be accessed by anyone on the Internet. What is usually done is a firewall is installed between your computers and the Internet. The firewall converts your Internal TCP/IP address to one of your public address when they want to send messages out on the Internet. This allows your computers to connect to computers on the Internet but prevents connections from the Internet to your computers. We have a block of 255 public addresses but have 400 computers that can access the Internet. This means that all 400 computers can not connect to the Internet at the same time. The firewall will use one of the public addresses for each computer that has a connection to the Internet. When the local computer is no longer connected to a computer out on the Internet, the firewall will reuse the number for another connection request. So, you need as many addresses as you will have concurrent users. If you want to use your Internet connection to receive messages such as e-mail, or host a web site, then you need to register a domain name. To register a name, go to WWW.whois.net. When you register a domain, you tell the Internet, what is the address of your public DNS server or servers. If you register a domain name of GGG.COM, you need to tell the .COM DNS servers what is the address of the GGG DNS server. It is the GGG DNS server that tells everyone on the Internet, where your mail should go, where your WWW web server is etc. Each host computer you want to make available will use one of your public addresses. Many shops only want to use their Internet connection to receive email and host a public web site. In that case, you may want to setup a NT server as the mail server and the web site host. That way your AS/400 is not on the Internet and is more secure. JHicks@SUZ.com