Re: Sharing a cable modem

Curtis Wilcox(cwcx[at]uhura.cc.rochester.edu)
Fri, 17 Jul 1998 00:09:34 +0200

At 10:26 PM 7/16/98 +0200, Greg Jewett wrote:
>The crossover cable -- yes -- you will need to use it to connect the
>cable-modem (transceiver) to your hub, if you current plug your CPU
>directly into your cable-modem currently. The cable you use to connect the
cable-modem currently is a cross-over cable. Use the patch cables to
connect your Mac and PC to the hub.

>Configure your PC with one IP, and the Macintosh with the other (see above).

First, my understanding is that some cable modem providers use cable modems
with multiple ports (since cable modems are really more like routers than
modems) making a hub unnecessary. If that's the case they will almost
certainly charge extra for each additional computer (say, if it's $40/month
for the first one, add $10 for each extra one).

However if they can't or won't give you more than one IP, that doesn't have
to be the end of it. There's all kinds of software (I've heard more about
the PC stuff but they exist for Macs) which lets a LAN share a single
network connection, modem, ISDN, whatever. WinGate is one example.
For Macs the main one I've heard of is Vicom Gateway but that's been in the
context of a LocalTalk network, not ethernet. I don't know how the software
or the MacOS handles multiple NICS which is what would be called for.
With this kind of software, it looks to the service provider like a single
user. Now maybe there's some packet filtering or traffic analysis they
could do to spot people "illegally" using a single connection for multiple
computers but my gut feeling is that it unlikely. Not that I'm advocating
going behind the company's back :)

--
Curtis Wilcox
___________________________     |     _________________________
cwcx@uhura.cc.rochester.edu     |     Never Get Out of the Boat

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Thu Jul 16 1998 - 15:16:37 PDT