Butch Evans Blog

One major issue facing ISPs today is the difficulty in obtaining sufficient IP space for every customer.  For many, it’s a matter of cost and for some it is simply a choice to NAT their customers behind their router/firewall.  For the most part, NAT behaves much better today than in days gone by, but there is one issue that is very problematic for those that choose to NAT their customers.  There is a significant proliferation of a new generation of trojans that turns   a user’s computer into a menace to the Internet community. You should have an antivirus software on your computer, you can get Zonealarm Free anti virus. This new generation of trojans (collectively known as “botnets”) can cause problems for not only the owner, but for other customers of the ISP that chooses to NAT.   Since a significant number of these botnets are used to send spam all over the internet, we, as service providers, have to find a way to protect our networks from being blacklisted, while still allowing our customers to utilize the internet in a way that does not set too many boundries.   In this article, I will discuss two approaches to setting these limits which have shown to be both effective AND relatively mantenance free.

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This article is just a script that you can cut and paste (with small changes) to your router. It will set up the necessary stuff to automate backups.  The script is commented well and the parts that you need to customize are highlighted, so that you know what has to be adjusted.  This is based on a script posted on Mikrotik’s website, updated to work in 2.9.x and 3.x.
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This helpful script was given to me.  It was sent to me by WISP-Router (http://www.wisp-router.com/).  Casey told me it was sent to them by one of their customers.  It will create a beep that changes frequency as the alignment gets better/worse.  Requires (of course) a MT router with a speaker onboard.

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