Home network and internet connection sharing question

[Louie1961]

OK, I think I know part of the answer to this, but am interested in all suggestions. The wife and I have a small network setup (win 98 SE peer to peer, with D-link DFE-530 TX fast ethernet NIC's, and a D-link DSS 5+ switch, cat 5 cables, etc.) This setup works great, and came with it's own internet connection sharing software (midpoint lite 4.0) which worked fine on a shared 56K modem connection (just tried it to experiment)

Now we are thinking of getting DSL or a cable internet connection and would like to do three things:

1. Share the one internet connection
2. Setup a firewall or other appropriate security to protect our data, etc.
3. Maintain the same level of funcionality that our peer to peer network provides

One of my machines is a dual boot win 98 and red hat linux 7, I also have an old p233 machine lying around which could be added to the mix as needed.

What would be the best way to do this? Alternatively, what would be the easiest/simplest way? I am thinking of running the third box on linux, and have the firewall, NAT, etc. all running on that box. What are the tricks to running a mixed linux/win 98 environment.

My only real requirement here is that I do not want to buy any other software, so I need to figure out a way to do this with Win 98 SE and/or red hat linux (and it's included goodies like Samba, etc.)

I would appreciate any links, info, advice, suggestions, etc.

Thanks in advance.

 

[BCYL]

The easiest way to accomplish what you want would be to buy a router... 5 mins to install, and gives you a hardware firewall for security... you can still share files with your wife's PC with the router's built-in switch...

However if you don't wanna spend any money, setting up your old PC to use Linux is a good idea too... Just run some of the single floppy distribution Linux for sharing connections like Coyote Linux or FreeSCO. These will let you share your connection without even a harddrive in the PC... Then setup the LAN between your wife's PC and yours using something like NetBeui instead of TCP/IP, and you have quite a secure connection already...

Of course you can always use your PC or your wife's PC as the server, and run Windows ICS on it... however I wouldn't go with this setup because it will tie up one of your PCs, and not that secure since one of your PC is directly connected to the internet... esp if you have an old PC lying around, no point in using one of your useful PCs as server...