Hi,

I am new to Linux. I have successfully installed a Server class Red Hat 7.2( thanks to Red Hats excellent manuals and user friendly interface) on my PC. I have configured my network card to connect to the Internet using a Cable modem. This computer has a 2nd network card which I wish to use to connect my 2nd PC which runs Windows 2000 and share the Internet Connection. I am trying to have the Linux machine connect to the cable and the Windows machine share the connection. Even though I have installed both Apache and Samba, I do not know what to do further. Do I need a router? Do I need to set up IP Masquerading? Do I need to set up a Internet Server? I have very very little knowledge about Web Servers and Networking. I would greatly appreciate any help in setting this up.

I'm affraid that I have never actually set-up ICS (internet connection sharing), but I believe this is the theory you need to put into practice:

First off, get your Linux box to connect to the internet with the cable modem.

Then setup your Linux box as a local network DHCP server.

Get your Windows machine to be given its IP address from the Linux DHCP server.

Get your Windows box to use the Linux box's IP as it's proxy server.

I don't think that the DHCP server bit is absolutely essential, but it will make life a little easier if the two are on the same network and can talk to eachother.

Now, samba is only used so that the two boxes can see the files that reside on their respective harddisks. Windows uses the SMB protocol for file-sharing, and does not understand NFS natively, and Linux uses NFS for file-sharing and does not understand SMB natively. As you might guess, the SAMBA package allows Linux to use the SMB protocol.

After wondering about this myself I have found two solutions which seem very easy. The first of these is to use software that all you need to do is tell it what your modem and IP settings are and its up and running (once you configure your windows boxes) For this you need to have a clean hard drive (or you can let it clean it for you.) Its found at www.clarkconnect.org its based on linux and free. However thats the easy route, and also the boring no fun route (unless you have dialup in which case you'd have to figure out how to use it (being a newbie myself I failed)). Another way is to follow a tutorial thingy that tells you step by step how to set it up, windows boxes included. The best one I've found is at http://ultra.litpixel.com:82/ip_masq...q_content.html also, if your interested in file sharing, you can use the tutorial at http://ultra.litpixel.com:82/samba/samba_content.html for instructions for using samba. This site has some other good tutorials for you to check out too www.everythinglinux.com (its not been updated in quite some time however as the author of the page has moved on to other similar sites). Hope this helps.
Gilkyboy