A few questions.
 

Does Red Hat 7.2 support USB?
Could i use this as my connection to the net? And use it as a proxy for my other computers?

I hope i am clear.

Thx

answer
1) yes
2) if your asking if it will support a alcatel usb modem i do believe so, but you may want to do some research on this. but check out this link:
http://www.alcatel.com/consumer/dsl/supuser.htm
3) check out this link for your proxy server:
www.squid-cache.org

they have good documentation on their website and the config file is well documented as well.

happy hacking!

i believe kernel 2.2.17 and beyond have usb support, with 2.4.X having better support than the previous kernel releases.
http://www.linux-usb.org/ has some good info on usb in linux.

As for your question regarding using RH 7.2 as your connection to the internet, and as a proxy, you have a couple of options. One way is to have it as the gateway computer to the internet, providing IP Masquerading for the hosts on your internal network. This is in essence network address translation. Look into documentation on IP-MASQ on how to configure this. Another option which you've touched on, is to use it as a proxy server - you could then cache content locally, and put access control on certain sites you'd rather not have accessible. Squid would be a great option for that. Either way, when it comes to network connectivity/services, Linux is where it is at.
HTH

thx for all the help guys/gals

i really appreciate it