[lug] Broadband in Eastern/Rural Boulder County?

[David L. Anselmi]

Ryan Kirkpatrick wrote:
[...]
> Looks like we are left with Sprint Mobile Broadband, 3G, so nice and fast,
> $70/month, so not too expensive, but with a 5GB/month transfer limit, okay
> for web surfing and email.

You can try squid or other types of caches, perhaps.

> The tricky part is that I need to share such a
> link with multiple computers in the house. Looks like the Sierra Wireless
> USB dongles have Linux drivers, so I should be able to whip up a Linux box
> firewall/router. Anyone have any experience in sharing a cellular
> connection with a network? Any recommended hardware? Thanks!

Is the Sierra dongle for cellular?  So you put the cellular interface 
and another (ethernet, wifi) on the linux box.  Configure the cellular 
as appropriate, configure the other with a private subnet of your 
choice.  Make the default route go to the cellular.  Put a 1 in 
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward.  Read Rusty's guide to iptables to get 
the commands to do NAT.

It seems that http://smoothwall.org/ is a pretty easy to use firewall 
distro.

Dave