DirecWay Satellite Configurations and LAN Configurations?

Need for Speed asks: "I just moved to the boonies and I'm looking into DirecWay from Hughes. I'm too far from my CO for ADSL and IDSL is too expensive. DirecWay requires their modem to be connected to the USB port and their software to be installed on the client. Multiple connections can be supported by enabling ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) in Windows on that client. I then can connect a router/etc to the ethernet card on that client. I don't want to sacrifice my Linux box to do this. A direct connection from the DirecWay modem to my Wi-Fi router would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be an option here. Has anyone successfully configured DirecWay without installing the DirecWay software and connecting the DirecWay modem directly to your computer?"

Comments

Sourceforge project

[missing000]

Here.
Next time, google.

Re:they're kidding, right?

[GoRK]

OK, I have used this. I have installed this. It sucks, but sometimes it's the only option.

A couple things about the need for USB: The directway hardware is actually two seperate units (TX and RX) daisy chained together. This allows them to be configured for both the one-way and the two-way satellite Internet configurations. Obviously the one-way satellite connection requires the modem in your computer to assist, so it must have some sort of direct connection to the computer. If they put an ethernet interface in it, then it'd only be functional for the two-way system. ....

So, why don't they just put an ethernet port in the Tx IRD? Well.. there are a couple of reasons they probably dont want to do this: The first is that the "software" you install really is basically just drivers for the IRD's and a configration tool to set up your account and whatnot.. it's not really fair to say that you have to install a whole suite of crap just to use the service. Anyway, the other nice little touch it does is to set MTU's and whatnot appropriately while the satellite network connection is active. If it didn't do this, users would constantly be complaining about how slow the service feels and DirectWay's network would be clogged with tinmeouts and tiny useless packets.

Also, keep in mind that these IRD's internally provide a serial datastream to and from the satellite. Could they put a router in it? Probably. Other satellite vendors have such devices. Would it cost a lot? Yeah probably would bring the already high equipment cost up a lot since they'd not really sell a lot of these... Would it hurt performance? Probably, if the average user does not alter certain network parameters, it would. Would it be a support nightmare? Probably, yeah.

Anyway, I really dislike their USB interface. There'd be a small but fledging market for a device that is a DirectWay ethernet router (Hello, linksys? :), but I dont really see it happening. Until then, I'm using either ICS or some other Win32 NAT solution to do the job.

Incedentally, for anyone setting this up, running a transparent web proxy on the gateway machine helps a lot. It'll give the end users speedy web access without them having to adjust their network settings to properly cope with a satellite connection (though it wouldnt hurt for them to do it anyway)

~GoRK

Spot On!

[Manic Miner]

I have also used this service, we used it to setup and internet connection in the middle of a forest, lets see ya get anything other than a satelitte connection in the middle of a forest ;)

The poster above is spot on with the description of the twin box unit etc. However there are a couple of points you need to consider. Firstly the software on your windows machine is used to download the correct keys to allow your connection to work. Once this has been setup they are stored in the satelite interface boxes, but you will need windows at least once for the setup / install.

Also, yeah the USB interface is not great, but there do exist satelite boxes for DirectWay that just provided an ethernet out - just expect to pay a LOT more for it. However ICS will work, as will other win32 Nat solutions. We used ICS with a separate linux webcache and caching DNS server. We ran a large number of PC's from this system with no real problems - however you will find the delay on dynamic pages - such as slashdot or web based mail client, is horrible. The speed is great, but the latency sucks :)