Like this one?

Or this one?

Ah yes winmodems, what garbage. That’s dumb. I probably should’ve dug deeper when I got it. Honestly I hate printers. I asked the printer community on Reddit to recommend me a cheap printer that used cheap toner. I gave them my requirements and they even found a Craigslist listing for me. I think I’m only in 20 or 40 bucks, can’t remember, but I guess I can’t complain too hard.

Can you get modern laser printers that work that way?

I recently tried setting up my hp p1102w to print from openwrt using p910nd, but can’t because it’s a “host based” printer, whatever that means.

Even in cups, it needs a special driver to get it to behave. Doesn’t even work out of the box on my Fedora install.

I bought it a couple years ago, second hand, because the toner is cheap, and if I don’t update the firmware, I can keep using aftermarket toner.

It has Wi-Fi, but sometimes it refuses to print from Linux or my phone, just randomly. Always works on Windows though 🤦‍♂️

My plan is to kill the Wi-Fi because I don’t trust it being so out of date anymore, and either plug it into my server or slap a rpi on the back with cups on the network. But it’s proving to be a painful experience.

Gotcha! No worries. Networking gets more and more like sorcery the deeper you go.

Networking and printers are my two least favorite computer things.

That makes sense. I haven’t used an ISP configured router in over a decade. At my parents house, their modem/router combo didn’t support bridge mode so I put it in a DMZ and slapped that to the WAN port on my router. Worked well.

Oh you mean DNS server, yes ok that makes sense. Yeah I totally understand running your own.

If I understand correctly, DHCP servers just assign local IPs on initial connection, and configure other stuff like pointing devices to the right DNS server, gateway, etc

Question, what’s the benefit of running a separate DHCP server?

I run openwrt, and the built in server seems fine? Why add complexity?

I’m sure there’s a good reason I’m just curious.

This is an example of what an Internet service providers network might look like.

They use many different types of specialized computers and devices to connect your house (one of the grey rectangles) to the greater Internet (the yellow rectangle in the middle).

One person is arguing that instead of the Internet service provider owning all of the red green and blue computers… Other people would own them. And maybe the red computer for your neighborhood would physically be inside your neighbor’s house, instead of in a small building or box on the side of the road somewhere nearby.

Functionally, it’s the same Internet, regardless of who owns the red box. Though theoretically, it could be less safe to give random people, potentially bad actors, access to the physical computer that is the red box, because they could do something malicious with it. But the point is, if the technology is working correctly, it doesn’t matter who owns it, everyone’s private home networks (everything downstream of your grey rectangle), are kept separate.

Just like normal Internet, you can’t print on your neighbor’s network printer, just because you both have the same ISP and share the same red computer upstream somewhere. The red computer won’t let it happen.

Does that make sense?

Now, the concern of the other guy, it seems, comes from not understanding this. Not understanding that the red computers are specially configured by the ISP, or whoever owns it, to keep the grey rectangles separate.

What he might be thinking, is something similar to sharing your Wi-Fi password. Or maybe running an Ethernet cable over the fence and plugging your neighbor’s router into your router. Things start to get complicated here, so I’ll gloss over a lot of things, but essentially… Your home router is not configured like the red computers are. So all of your neighbors data would be going through your home network, and you could very likely see what he’s doing, and he could potentially see what you’re doing (provided there’s no double NAT, but even then I’m not sure, maybe).

Basically, if two or more neighbors want to share Internet, but don’t know how to do it safely, then they can expose their private network activity to each other and open each other up to a decent amount of risk.

The solution, is to configure your router in a similar way to the red computers. It’s complicated, but not that difficult in practice. You could Google VLANs to get an idea of what would need to be done. Honestly you’d need more than that, some good firewall rules, and more things that I’m not qualified to comment on. I’m not a networkologist. But it can be done.

The debate/argument stems from a basic misunderstanding of how these systems work. Or perhaps they both understand how they work, but the guy who doesn’t want to do it is just worried about his neighbors being untrustworthy with the hardware being in their house, worried they’ll be nefarious, but he’s just bad at communicating that idea to the other guy.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter who owns the red computers or the green or blue, if they’re configured correctly, you’re safe. Unless you don’t trust whoever owns the computers 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully that makes sense! Let me know if you have any questions!

This. Though theoretically you could do it without CGNAT, maybe some type of complex vlan arrangement? I’m not sure, I’m not a networkologist.

I do know that I just got fiber down my road from a smaller company, still a big multi state company, but not Comcast or charter big. I called them because I was worried about CGNAT for my self hosting. The salesman didn’t know what I was talking about, which is disappointing but not surprising. But they forwarded me to the tech guys, who also claimed to not know what I was talking about… Which was either a downright lie, or they were idiots, either way it’s very concerning.

The price was right though, $5 cheaper per month, for 10 times faster download, and 30 times faster upload. So I gave it a shot. Thankfully I’m not behind a CGNAT, yet 🤞

Finally set up my proxmox server, been procrastinating for a year. Thought on a whim, “I’m only using 2 of my 4 slots, and I could benefit from a bit more RAM. It’s DDR4, can’t be that expensive”.

Yeah… It was that expensive. More expensive than when I bought the stuff originally when this computer was new.

Legitimately. Fedora Bluefin here. Giving the atomic thing a try 😁