My home network consists of a Sparc running Solaris, A PC with Windows 95 and another PC running Linux. What I wanted to do was allow any machine on this private network to connects to my ISP, ORAC,[17] via a single modem, with an IP address being dynamically assigned when I dial in.
My Linux system is actually my old 486/33 set up to run Linux so that I can have a play with Linux. Unfortunately, this system chokes on any high data transfer rate, so I need to use the Sparc to transfer data. Solaris's PPP support is pretty primitive and, in particular, doesn't seem to support the hooks needed to support NAT and packet filtering over a dynamic link neatly.
Below is a guide to connecting to ORAC (or another ISP) using network address translation on Solaris. To accomplish this, is am using two packages: One is IP-Filter,[11] a neat package that allows me to filter packets and do NAT (network address translation). The other is DP,[5] a PPP package that does support dynamic address assignment.
Note that my way is not the only way. Rachel Polanskis has set up a similar arrangement using Free PPP, rather than my DP.[18,8]