Sanity Check & Advice re: 3G gateway

Hi Folks,

I'm looking at how to offer set ups with a internet access via 3g in areas where there is no phone lines but plenty of 3g signal.

Now, our standard network build puts the domain controller (single server set ups) on 192.168.1.2 and all clients are dhcp and I'm wondering if connecting up the 3g dongle to the domain controller and using ICS is the way to go here or whether that is going to upset client's looking for the DC on the 'wan' IP.

I'm unfortunately not in a position to get this wrong as the poc deployment kit is in Africa and I'm... well, not.

At the moment I am able to use the 3g dongle to get 'in' to the domain controller via Logmein and that is fine, is it really as simple as enabling 'sharing' on this connection or do I want to look at bridging it with the lan nic?

Also, the connection drops a few times an hour, other than the obvious lack of connection for the downstream clients will it be as simple as redialing the connection out and the 'route' as such will become available again?

Thoughts welcomed.

Thanks.


EDIT:

At the moment I'm only able to consider a simple solution on top of the 2003 DC, I do not wish to introduce additional complexity to the set up with additional hardware or virtualised instances (I'd have done this with Smoothwall express in a heart beat otherwise) as the on site hands are trained to this standard build solely and I am not able to travel over there for some time to rebrief on changes.

If the signal drops then I would definatly use ICS or even RRAS as the provider because bridging it will cause the lan interface to drop also if the signal dies.

Depending on the way the 3g is presented to the OS is may be possible to add it as a connection in RRAS which would allow you to setup routing etc. Either way your default gateway will end up being your DC's ip address and the DNS will point there to so the clients should be happy as long as DHCP is configured to point everything at the server.

ICS proxies everything via NAT where as RRAS is slightly more complicated to setup but probably a more robust solution that can be configured to restrict certain ports/ips if required.

As always an excellent response from you SYNACK.

Will ICS still do its old trick of reckoning it knows best and changing my lan interface to 192.168.0.1 do you know?

The connection shows up a dial up network connection as far as windows is concerned.

Cheers mate.

Kim

You can get 3G routers from various suppliers, don't know if this would help but thought I would let you know if not aware already.

Thanks Matthew. At the moment that is not an option.

Thanks nonetheless.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kmount

Will ICS still do its old trick of reckoning it knows best and changing my lan interface to 192.168.0.1 do you know?

The connection shows up a dial up network connection as far as windows is concerned.

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Yes as far as I know ICS will pull the same stunt is usually does, as it shows up as a dial up network you should be able to set it up under RRAS as long as it does not need an always on client app that can't run as a service.

Here is a link to a setup run-through that should provide a clearer picture Configuring Windows Server 2003 to act as a NAT router . TBH if it was me I'd try to avoid ICS as it may get in the way of a bunch of the other services and may allow the users to view and possibly disconnect the connection from each station. Its been a while since I used RRAS but I know that under XP some setups allowed for the users to disconnect and also it meant (as it was a DUN adapter) that unless you did some hacking in the registry it did not connect automaticly at startup and could fail after a certain number of disconnects due to the autoreconnect option not tripping etc. RRAS runs as a service and should take care of this stuff for you without poking around in the registry.

Big thanks Synack :)