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Isolating LANs?

Hi Everyone,

I look after a small LAN on for a small rural resort. They've got a handful of computers plugged into a Linksys BEFSR41

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router for network & internet connectivity.

I'm looking for some way to set things up so that if this resort "shares" its internet connection with a few neighbours they can't "see" the other computers on the LAN, nor can the neighbours see each other's computers. The computers at the resort should still be able to see each other.

Can anyone recommend a (hopefully inexpensive) piece of hardware to accomplish this? I know I could probably research some kind of a Linux box to manage the traffic, but I'd prefer to have some kind of small dedicated piece of equipment that doesn't risk a hard disk failure, power supply failure etc. as I'm six hours away and the folks at the resort are computer illiterate.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Geoff Glave Vancouver, Canada

Reply to
gglave
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Easiest and cheapest I can think of is to put routers between each neighbor and the rest of the net. Think of the routers as one way valves. Hosts on the LAN side can reach anyone on the WAN side, but, unless you configure port forwarding, hosts on the WAN side can't reach anyone on the LAN side. Connect all the resort computers to the LAN side of a new router, and another new router for each neighbor that shouldn't see anyone else. BEFSR41 is fine, I happen to like Linksys but there are many others around. I have seen routers advertised down to about $5 or so, or you can find them on eBay.

It is best if each sub-LAN is a different subnet, though that isn't required. They should probably be different than the intermediate network, though.

By the way, this isn't really an ethernet question and should probably go to comp.protocols.tcp-ip.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

A 3com 3300 switch can do this with a vlan setup. 12 port ones can be had on ebay for $100 or so. (it will also talk to a free 3com util called network supervisor very nicely) gr

Reply to
gr

neighbor and the rest of the net.

I think this is what I'll do. Thanks everyone for your suggestions.

Cheers, Geoff Glave Vancouver, Canada

Reply to
gglave

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