I have been wanting to
google about these
routers which act like mini-pc and help share net to other PC's
Ummm. That is, by definition, exactly what a broadband router does - shares net between multiple PCs.
A mini-PC which shares net and acts like a mini-PC can be called a broadband router, but at the end of the day, it's just a mini-PC which happens to be routing - in other words, it can have other functions.
Of course, a mini-PC doing this job is potentially far more powerful since you could set up IPtables or a Squid Caching server on it, and you could set up a full software firewall and/or load balancer - unlike the device in question.
normal routers won't be able to do it because of the dialup,normal routers want username or ip adress which these don't apply to plus reliance keeps logging off the user so it will be difficult for the router
What you're probably thinking of is an
ADSL router, whereas the model I have suggested is a standard, run of the mill broadband router with 4 port switch and Wireless (802.11G for this model).
Plug an Ethernet cable in to the port marked "WAN", plug the other end of said ethernet cable in to the equipment supplied by the ISP.
The
MAC ID of the WRT54G will be authenticated (as is needed with most cable ISPs such as Hathway, Fivenet or others), given an IP address and can offer DHCP services, so essentially after it's set up the WRT54G does all the actual routing work in the network and the ISP supplied equipment then becomes nothing more than a media convertor in most cases.
If the connection is PPPoE, then the ISP supplied equipment *or* the WRT54G router can be used to do the dialing, thus removing the need for you to set up a PPPoE dial-up connection on each computer and allowing, as I said in my previous post, multiple computers to share the same connection, whether it is "single user" or not.
In the case of Reliances authentication - as I understand it you have to authenticate through a webpage. This would still work because the router would essentially be the only device that the ISP supplied equipment sees and thus any computer can be used to log in via Reliances webpage, thus essentially authenticating for the whole network.
Presumably however, that PC has to remain on otherwise Reliance authentication servers might ping back to see if the connection is still active, and then when the WRT54G returns "nope, I'm offline" because the original host no longer responds, Reliance authentication would terminate the session.
There is, however, nothing stopping you from just pulling up your browser and logging in again - no big deal.
