Need help setting up a home network.
 

I've been using Linux a while but am totally new to networking. Here is a list of equipment I have and a description of what I would like to do. Please keep in mind this is new to me so KIS!
Thanks.

1 Dualboot XP / FreeBSD desktop box
1 Laptop Slackware 10
1 Laptop XP
1Router (Compusa generic 4 port)
1 56k external modem (works with Linux)
1 p2 500mz 64ram 6g hd desktop (no os)
All machines have NIC's
Currently I have a DSL modem plugged into the router to connect the machines to the internet.
Financial concerns are forcing me to discontinue the DSL service and go to dialup. What I would like to do is have these machines share the internet connection like they do now. Is this possible?? And if so can more than one user at a time access the Internet??
I've done some reading on the internet on this but I frankly can't make sense of most of the jargon.
Someone told me Smoothwall could do this. so I burned an image of it and tried to use it . Can't make head or tails of the setup choices. Webmin was also recommended.Installed it on the BSD system and have had little luck with it also. Please help!!!!

:scratch:

Yes. Before I got DSL service, I had my three connected via one dialup. As long as they a properly LANd all can use same connection at same time. ...or individually.

You don't need any extra software that I am aware of. Whichever machine is connected to the dial-up service will serve as gateway for the others via your LAN.

Thanks for answering. Here's what I've done so far:
Turned off the DSL modem. and pinged all the machines. They all transmitted / received successfully (also pinged the router, same results) Does this mean they are networked correctly or is there anything else I need to do?
Thanks for your patience with all these NOOB questions of mine, it's just important I get this right the first time. We depend on the computer for a lot of things here and I can't afford to mess it up.

:study:

The router acts as a DHCP server and is connecting all your computers together. If you can ping the other computers, you're good to go!

The general idea is to have one of the comuters connected directly to the dial-up ISP via modem. It can be a linux box (even Win XP could do, but you'd have to find a different forum to ask for help about that :) ). This one will be called 'the server'.
The other computers will connect to the Iternet through the server. That is, you will set their 'default gateway' setting to the IP address of the server.
On the server, you will have to turn on masquerading (also known as NAT).

Thanks all for your help and patience. I think I've almost got it. Here's the rundown:
Loaded smoothwall into an old pc and set it up per the instructions. It now dials out ok but the connection is not sharing
The dhcp logs from smoothwall show it is receiving requests from the other machines but labels them as "unknown leases" I noticed the ip adresses on my other machines remain the same as before so I'm assuming the router is issuing them. Is that the problem?
If so, what's the solution? Thanks again



:study:

I finally figured it out!!! Just in case anyone out there is as dumb as I am and runs into the same problem:
Don't use dhcp in smoothwall reconfigure machines to static IP and presto!
Thanks to all for your help and patience. I got so frustrated a couple of times I almost used (gasp) Windoze to do this as I had heard it was a two minute operation.

:Pengy: