well,
all you need is a simple box with 2 NIC's, a recent version of any linux 
distro you can think of and a little knowledge of either ipchains or iptables 
(recommended). this will be your gateway box. you setup eth0 to act as your 
public interface and have eth1 as MASQ/NAT. for most simple operations, this 
will work nicely. I have a sample iptables script you can use if you want.

in the meantime, a simple box will do ok... no need to install loads of devel 
packages or extras. keeping it simple generally means being a little more 
secure. also, you want to examine exactly which services on your box are 
needed. as for SAMBA, you can run that, but unless you really want to share 
the partitions on your gateway box, I wouldn't recommend it.

Technomage

On Thursday 02 May 2002 09:08 pm, you wrote:
> Hello everyone, this is my first submission. I would like to set up a home
> network for the purpose of sharing my DSL connection. I was ready to buy a
> router when I heard that that I could accomplih this with linux. Only two
> computers right now but I will be adding a laptop next month. My Linux box
> is running RH 7.2 with the network installation and two NIC cards
> installed. My windows machine has a card installed. I have a cable modem
> and network cables. I have already established a internet connection with
> eth0. How do I configure eth1? What else do i need to know? Will this
> require installing Samba? Your dealing with a newbie here guys, I hope this
> is not too lame of a question. I appreciate any help, Thanks

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