not able to connect the mobile broadband

Hmm... I figured it out through networkmanager, firestarter, and GADMIN-DHCPD. But I have a new question. When I set up the ad-hoc network it always assigns 10.42.43.1 to my wireless interface. I had wanted a 192.168.10.0 address, but it automatically comes up 10.42.43.1. Any idea why? as long as I build my dhcpd around this it works.

again, thanks,

DMSSwitcher

OK. I have to put my network admin hat on....

Speaking as someone who manages the VPN network at work, I have to ask why you want to do this? From a professional point of view I'd be extremely concerned about a few things. I'm assuming here that you are working for a relatively large corporation.

1) for clarification, are you looking to have this set up at work or at home? If you are looking to set this up at work you will want to check that your company's IT policies allow you to connect home computers up to the office network. This will also apply if you are connecting from home. The reasons are many: people will be able to run unauthorized software on the company network (ie. peer-peer networking, video streaming, etc.) that can suck the life out of some corporate networks. The PC could have been hacked and end up being used as a SPAM bot, right under the user's nose. This can be devastating to a mail firewall which often train their databases based on the content of outgoing mail. We had a client once that had a VP bring in what turned out to be an infected laptop that was spewing SPAM every time it connected to a network. Within a day, it had "trained" the MXtreme mail firewall that viagra, et.al was a company product and the spam started flooding in from the outside as well since the MXtreme now thought it was legit. Needless to say, the corporate higher-ups were extremely displeased with the offending VP. It should be pointed out that, while Linux, and BSD in particular, is generally much more secure than Windows, corporate policies seldom state something like "thou shalt not use non-company computers on the network unless it's running Ubuntu". Generally, it's corporate computers only, no exceptions. Don't get yourself in trouble.

2) There's the issue of a WiFi hotspot either inside or outside (via VPN) the corporate network. Unless this is properly secured, it gives any successful hacker an open door behind your company's firewall. It's a great way to get fired.

3) You mentioned that you wanted to have access to the company's broadband. If this means you are bringing your personal laptop to work, point #1 not withstanding, then it makes some sense. However if you are planning to set this up at home, as your reference to a VPN suggests, then I would point out that the actual bandwidth you will experience will in fact be less than what you are already getting at home. If you have a 1 Megabit connection at home and the company has a 10 Megabit connection, it's the 1 Megabit connection that's going to be the limiting factor. Less, in fact, because the VPN itself will use some of the bandwidth as overhead.

4) You mentioned that the company filters sites you like to visit. As a technical note, a VPN does not filter anything. It simply encrypts traffic to prevent third parties from seeing it. The filtering you are referring to would be coming from the company's servers. The MXtreme mail server I mentioned in point one is one example, in this case, dedicated to mail, but there are others. You should be aware that the other types of filters may require you to connect to a proxy server at work. That is to say, if you try connecting to the corporate VPN with your home laptop, you're web pages will not be filtered (to remove ads, for example) because your home laptop will just go straight out on the internet via the corporate VPN and nothing will be filtered. You would have to find out what the corporate proxy settings are to benefit from any filtering. The problem with this is that when you run your home laptop without the VPN, you will have to turn off your proxy settings to go on the internet. You can in fact do the filtering yourself with surprising effectiveness on your own laptop, if that's what you're interested in. More on that later.

5) Lastly, there's the issue of reasonable internet use. Companies realize that employees can and will surf the internet over lunch, etc, and that it won't all be for business uses. They can, however, protect themselves by having access to the log files on all the corporate computers should there be any concerns. Now, let's say, for example, that you are bent on doing something illegal on-line. The police come calling on the company with log files that say that traffic originating behind the corporate firewall was involved in such-and-such. The company can protect itself by reviewing the logs of the various PCs to find the culprit, but what happens in the case of a home computer via a VPN or (worse) wireless connection? The police will still insist the traffic came from the corporate firewall but the company can't cooperate by producing logs on private PCs. That's a major reason why companies often have a policy forbidding home users from connecting with anything other than the corporate laptop. To protect themselves from potential prosecution, they need to have access to all the hardware. Again, you could get yourself in deep do-do by doing this.

On the subject of filtering...

If all you are really after is to filter ads from web pages, protect the munchkins from inappropriate web sites and/or filter spam from your email, here's what I do:

Filtering ads: I'm a big fan of Privoxy. In it's default configuration, it removes quite a bit of junk. The rule base is just a text file and can be edited to make it less or more aggressive. It's a proxy server you run on your own PC, or (in my case) one PC in the house and the kids are set up to connect via it. It's also on my laptop for travelling. There are others, just look up "proxy server"

Filtering sites: Privoxy scans a site as it's being loaded and nukes it based on it's set of rules. To prevent a site from ever being contacted in the first place, I just use my own DNS server. You install BIND9 (or one of several others) and tell all the computers in your house to use it for their DNS information. I also have it installed on my laptop so I have a copy with me when I travel. You set it up as a caching server so it will remember the sites that were visited recently (I use this to check up on the kids, as well as privoxy's logs) and then set up your computer(s) to connect to it first, then try other sources of DNS in case the server fails for some reason. Have you ever heard of "doubleclick.com"? They're one of the most prolific advertisers on the internet. Normally when your browser loads a page, it's not only loading the page from that site, but references to a sometimes impressive array of other sites as well that deliver "content" most of which are ads. Doubleclick.com or .net is likely to be in there somewhere. I've told BIND that I own doubleclick.net, .com, .org, .biz, etc. so that when someone in the house hits a page that tries to load a doubleclick ad, myserver claims that it owns it and directs the browser to download the ad from a bogus location (actually, the DNS server itself, which doesn't provide anything). As a result, no ad pops up because the real doubleclick never got contacted. I get very few ads on my web pages and if I do find one coming up more and more often, I go into my browser's history and add the URL's to my BIND9 config file and that's the end of that.

Filtering email: I've had the same email address for about 7 years but I only get (perhaps) five spam messages a year, so I don't worry too much about this. In my windows world at work, before we got a dedicated mail filter, I was using either Camel's Eye for POP3 mail or ???? for Outlook connected to an Exchange server (sorry, forgot the name). Under Ubuntu, if I actually had a problem I'd be taking a look at Bogofilter, for example. Needless to say, I've never bothered to set it up, so I have no idea what's involved.

For what it's worth, the program I used for Outlook was SpamBayes.

have u installed usbmodeswitch. it is like a... a kind of driver for udb modem i ubuntu. it is basically a switch