Greetings!


I will be moving to a new home soon and there will be a lot of work to do to build a good network topology using current equipment and a very limited fund for new equipment. As I am not an expert on networking, I'd very much appreciate some insight. =)

Current situation:
I have a linux box which runs the DSL-connection and acts as a firewall, www-proxy (squid) and dns-proxy (bind) for 3 clients. The clients are all connected to the linux box via a hub.

New situation:
There will be about 8 clients, at least 2 of which must (!) be connected wireless. The other ones will have 10/100mbit lan. We do already have a DSL connection and a device which acts as a DSL-modem, router and wireless access point. It has no integrated hub/switch however; only one ethernet port!


I thought about using the DSL-router device as a modem only (this is possible) and using my linux server to connect through it and serve the clients as it used to. But as far as I know it will not be possible to connect clients via wireless this way as the device will only act as a "dumb" DSL-modem.
However I could let the device make the connection itself and let it act as a router. In that case, the wireless clients would connect to the device directly but they will not be able to benefit from my www-proxy. And my linux box would serve as a router/proxy between the other clients and the router device.

Now I don't know if or how well any of these solutions would work. Is there a better way to give all the clients (wireless and ethernet) access to the internet? I would like to stress the point that I would like as many clients as possible to be able to utilize the www-proxy on my linux server as this would greatly help the performance.

I would be very happy about any suggestions on how I could establish a good and efficient network topology under these circumstances!


PS: I am sorry if I did not make myself clear enough. English is not my mother language but I would very much like to clarify if necessary. =))


Thanks very much for your time!

Could you provide the make/model of the DSL wireless modem? If it does act as an access point, it may be able to route traffic from the wireless client computers to the wired linux box. Make sure these two computers have a firewall installed to protect the lan, and don't rely on WEP because it isn't secure. ( I found out myself recently )