Slightly Compicated Network Setup

[TuShan]

I curently have an eclipe internet ADSL account with 1 static ip, using NAT to route out to 4 PC's im thinign off moveing to ZEN ADSL and getting 8 ips, ive been told that i should eather just have an ADSL modem conected to a switch then to each PC, i ahve also been told some router can do this.

i would like each PC to have its own static IP, could anyone go into more detail about setting this up, and could nyone recomend needed hardware...

Thanks
Kolin

[nichomach]

Can I ask why you would need the 8 static IPs? Do you actually need to make 8 machines directly addressable?

[TuShan]

No i dont need 8 ips, but they only offer eather 1 or 8. i would like my PC's to have diferent IP's rather than using NAT, VNC SSH HTTP FTP WEBMIN etc on each off 4 PC's can get confuseing with nat

[nichomach]

I'd still use NAT but with one-to-one rather than many-to-one NAT (i.e. all requests to external address 1 map to internal address 1, and so forth rather than port forwarding requests for specific ports to different machines). Can I ask whether it would be practicable to configure whatever machine you're connecting to these 4 machines from in the outside world to be a VPN client? If so, you could use something like http://www.3com.com/prod/en_UK_EMEA/...&sku=3CR860-95, which allows up to two VPN tunnels using L2TP over IPSec.If not, then you'd have to configure your firewall rules to allow specific traffic through from WAN to LAN.

[TuShan]

I dont think a VPN would be off much use, i need to beable to acccess all the mahcine from Uni, and a few friends need to access soem off the machines, i could go for one - one nat, but id be interested to findout exactly how both work, and the pros/cons before decideing.

Thanks Kolin