Oky, to put all the technical stuff aside, it allows you to manually "dail" into your dsl account. For instance, at my mothers business, She has 1 router. There are about 5 laptops (via Wifi), and 4 computers (via UTP cable). They use one physical telephone line, and each dial one of two connections at a time. Either into afrihost for normal internet, or into a telkom private network (she also faxes from her computer through the same line with 56K modem). So each machine can independantly connect to its own network. This is truly amazing compared to having 16+ telephone lines for the connections as telkom would have it. Telkom and ISP's may say these things are not supported, but it works 100%. You just need to know what your hardware is capable of.
So you might be afraid of exposing your home network? No sir. In windows 7, the connections between the machines and the router, are identified as seperate from the internet. And in windows 7, you can set it to "Home", and it will operate as a normal LAN, so you can share stuff. When you dail your internet through that LAN, it will recognise it as a seperate connection, and set it to public. This way the machine is hidden from all the baddies out there. This is for windows 7 systems, I do not know about linux/winxp. BTW, on this LAN, all computers can print to a printer on one machine, if you share it ofcoarse.
Also, If you struggling with the setup, easy thing to fix many a problem would be to use static IP's, and limit the amount of static IP's on the router. You can also use mac filtering to keep baddies out. The static IP's, plus the same subnetmask across, plus the same workgroup is flawless.
Just be careful though, the PPP protocols must be supported by the OS. For instance, on windows 7 you can easily dail. Its fast, and you have control to turn it off, without killing your home network by switching off your router. But for instance, Android does not have PPP, so my phone can connect to the network, but cannot dail. Same thing to watch out for Xbox. It might not be able to dail. I do not own one, so I do not know.
Something else to consider, Bridge mode is just one way of handlng connections. On my router there are about 8 modes. I'm almost certain there would be a mode for having a default connection thats always on, unless you dail something different alongside it. So the xbox can use the default, and your pc can switch between capped & uncapped accounts at your whim.
I do not know how capable Telkoms' routers are, but Im using Cisco Linksys flavour. Most excellent. I am going to certify myself for cisco products next year.
I hope this help, but the best way to sort it, is to experiment. Most routers have a small reset switch on the back, so you cant really 'break' anything for good. Just remember that routers also acts as a switch, and that it has alot of power over your network (it is considered intelligent). If you set it up correctly, nothing can break the setup. My mothers network has been running everyday for the past 2 years on that setup, and not once did something go wrong. No resource collisions.
For arguments sake, it is really worth it to buy Windows 7. Is is super stable. I havent managed to crash my machines in all the time I've been using it. Even our Varsity is switching to Windows 7 in December, and hopefully they'll let me help with the deployments.
If you live in Bloemfontein, give me a shout and I can come help you.
Dirk
