John,
I have 4 unix boxes here and 4 windows machines. Two of the windows machines are laptops. One of the laptops is connected via 802.11.g. You should have no problems. The only snag is the host ports are blocked for the residential contract. When you have the residential contract the connection is PPPoE. With the business contract you just connect a 10/100 switch to the cat 5 comming from the network interface, it's all done with IP encapsulated over ethernet.
I did buy an adtran router but I'm not using it right at the moment, if I ever build a more elaborate network it will come in handy ie subnets and dynamic routing. The Adtran supports Link-State and Distance-Vector dynamic routing. And much more too.
So basically I have my BSD server running directly connected to the internet with a static IP. Also I still use my basic D-Link broadband router/firewall/NAT, except that it has a static IP on the WAN side. It's not really complicated.
-Bill 'GF
Okay thanks. So in other words what you are saying is that I should have no problem with the Unix/Linux boxes and FIOS. Now, retgarding Verizon blocking the host ports with the residential contracts I assume you're referring to stuff like port 80 (standard http), port 21 (ftp), port 25 SMPT. That should be no problem. I do run those services now but they are ONLY available for users on my local network. So thosze will continue to work fine since I don;t want them accessible to the outside world anyway. Then therer is always the issue of "non-standart ports"
My only problem with VZ and port blocking is that I have heard that VZ blocks outgoing/incoming SMTP traffic (port 25) to residential customers to all but Verizons mail servers. Thus residential customers are forced to use verizons email servers. That largely sucks for me because I currently have several third party email providers who's servers I access and once I switch to Verizon I won;t be able to use them anymore and that really bites. Unfortunately this is becoming more and more a standard practice among ISP's to cut down on SPAM. Fortunately there is a way around this, many email providers are enabling users to access their servers on nonstandard ports. Since most ISP's don;t block all ports it's a workaround for cases where port 25 is blocked.
Okay as far as the connection to VZ FIOS via a computer configured as a router or using a dedicated router I would need to set my router to talk PPPoE to the VZ FIOS side of the connection and set it to use something like DHCP (or directly assign addresses) on my side of the network along with my existing switch. Then all one needs to do is simply plug in to the switch and they'll have full access to all network services including the Internet.
When I was in school back in my PDP-11 and VAXen days I denver imagined I'd be thinking of multiple machines and high speed network configurations...for the HOME !!
