I've searched the boards & google, and although there are many resources on this topic, I can't seem to make any sense of it. Here's the problem:

I finally got my second ethernet card up. I have one card (eth0) connected to my cable modem. I've got one card connected to my second computer (fuckface). On an unrelated matter (or maybe it is), everytime I boot up, even though I have added modprobe rtl8390 to rc.local, it dosen't wanna recognize my eth1. Anyways, I get that back up, fire up smbd & nmbd (can I put those in rc.local also?). I try to ping fuckface. Unknown host. I try to smbclient - L //fuckface. No luck. I don't know exactly what to do here. I'm eventually trying to get MASQ working, but this how-to asked that I could at least ping the other computers before I take the other steps. Any ideas on how to get my computers to ping each other? BTW, I set the subnet mask for both PCs as 255.255.248.0 and no default gateway for the Win2k box (fuckface). I tried to set fuckface's IP to 192.168.0.1 as opposed to a dynamic IP. No luck either. I could post my samba.conf file, but I don't think there's anything weird in it.

Thanks [in advance] for the help,
lackluster

What is your ifconfig result? Which IP does eth1 have? It should be in the same network as your second machine.
Look also into route. Is route to your second machine set (eth1 somewhere in it) ?
The command to add it will be
route add -net <second machine ip> netmask 255.255.248.0 eth1

ifconfig -a returns :
Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:00:00:00:00:00
BROADCAST NOARP MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:29:7E:8E:3E
inet addr:68.49.220.239 Bcast:68.49.223.255 Mask:255.255.248.0
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:30044 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3832 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:26 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:2891607 (2.7 Mb) TX bytes:615773 (601.3 Kb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xe400

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:02:2A:BDB:56
BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)
Interrupt:10 Base address:0xe000

lo Link encap:Local Loopback
inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0
UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:3924 Metric:1
RX packets:104 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:104 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
RX bytes:6270 (6.1 Kb) TX bytes:6270 (6.1 Kb)

I think that first one is from dummy but it got cut off....

Anyways, how do I set an IP address for eth1? And what should I set it to? Also, I was thinking I shouldn't set the IP address of the other computer because it's not set when it connects to my windows. It's set to 'Obtain an IP address automatically'.

The route thing failed saying something like unknown host

thanks fro the reply

To set IP address to eth1
ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.1
(192.168.1.1 is good local IP address).
So the other machine can be configured to be 192.168.1.2, for example. Without dhcp, in such 2 computer network it's easier to use static IPs.
Then you should add route to your second machine:
route add -net 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1
And ping should be available both ways.

route -v add 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 eth1
netmask dosen't match net address

However, I can ping by IP the name of my computer, the IP of my computer and the other one. I cannot ping the name of the second one. When I go to the second computer I can ping everything I wanna ping.

This is as far as I'll go on this problem for now, as I feel I have done all the steps needed before I set up IP MASQ, as laid out in http://www.nerdsnetwork.com/IP-MASQ.htm

Mara,
thanks for your replies, you were a great help

If you add the second machine's name to your /etc/hosts, you'll be able to ping it by name...

Good luck!