The ingredients we need:

• Alcatel Speed Touch Ethernet ADSL modem.
• OS/2 any version with MPTS
• 10/100 switch

I name this modem, because it cheaper then an ADSL-router and it has lots of support on the net. Also, it has nice things like a line quality checker, and some dude has created Nubz Alcatool (sorry, Windows/Mac only) but this tool will allow you to see/configure many things you haven't seen before on ADSL, such as showing line-quality graphically and much more. The source is also availible, maybe somebody can compile it for OS/2?

The first thing we do is hack the modem into a router, why not buy a router in the first place? That's because it's no fun, and we want fun don't we? The hack is very simple and is just a change of 1 byte. The link on how to do it is here.

After you got your modem working as a router, the only thing you need to do is telnet to the modem and change the following. Go into the NAT section and set the following command: Defserver addr=10.0.0.10 (or whatever your IP of your server is) this command will pass all incoming packets to your machine They call this DMZ (de-militarized-zone) a difficult word for a router that passes all incomming traffic to a specified server, they always try to make it so complicated, but what for? As it does nothing more then pass incomming traffic from the outside address to a server through NAT.

So now you can run the webserver I was talking about last month. If you have configured your modem correctly, you can put all stuff in OS/2 to 10.0.0.138 for DNS, Gateway and default routing. The modem will handle it all on it's own.

All clients could be set to DHCP (except your server) if you like and can connect to the modem thru the switch, where we have the modem connected to. No need for Injoy or Safefire, the modem has it all build in: Nat, Firewall, DHCP server, DNS caching server and router.

When you run a webserver, you can simply use the zone-edit python client to examine the new IP by requesting it from the modem, just let the script run with the "-r 10.0.0.138/cgi/router/" option and your domain name dns will be changed and can be resolved by other people so that they can access your server.

Don't forget to change the MTU size to 1492 as OS/2 defaults to 1500, and that value is too high for ADSL. If you don't, your connection will slow down. This can be changed very simply by editing \MPTN\BIN\SETUP.CMD, and just run it after you change it, no need to reboot as OS/2 will accept the changes while running. [You can also change this in the OS/2 TCP/IP Configuration notebook on the Advanced 1 tab where it says Maximum Transmission Unit. Ed.]

I have used Injoy and Safefire, they are both too complicated to set up and not fast/good enough to do the same as hardware does.