At the moment i'm using my Celeron 366 to act as my file and print
server for my home network, however I only have a 10Mb Nic in it. This has been fine for now but i'm going to be getting a 24x cd-r this christmas and the 10Nic will not cut it.
Right now I use a 4x cdrom and the networks throughput is more then enough
for it , but there is no way It will be able to keep up with a 24x

I'm planing on buying a Smartlink 1205RC, D-link DFE-530TX+, or the SMC SMC1244TX. I'm still not 100% sure which is the best.

My question is, if I remove my current NIC (which was automatically found my
redhat install) and put in the new one will I have to do any configuation
changes to get it to recognize the 10/100 capability or to my samba or ssh
settings?

As long as the NIC and its corresponding module load up correctly, that should be all. I know that Samba is unaware of the actual network hardware and its capabilities; I believe anyhting like ssh, telnet, etc., are the same.

Like he said just change the module and the rest will work.

I doubt you'll be able to burn at 24 speed over the network. Even if you do change to a 100mbit network card.

Theoretically it should all work. A 80 minute cd at 24 speed should take about 3 and a half minutes. So that would be 700MB to transfer in 3 and a half minutes. That's about 3.5 MB per second. Ok technically a 100mbit card should have a transfer rate of 12.5 MB per second and the protocol you are using is generating a lot of overhead, and there might be collisions on the network so you could probably take off about a third of the speed but even then you still should be able to reach the speed.
But those aren't really the limiting factors the biggest limiting factors are your harddrive and the speed at which the processor can slap a TCP/IP header to the data and send it off to the network.
You said you had a celeron 366 as a server and I don't know what kind of harddrive you have in there but I bet it's not the fastest on the market either. The CPU will be heavely overloaded at higher speeds depending some nics use less cpu processing power which might help a lot.
Anyways I think you'll be lucky if you even make it at 12 speed. But then again that's always faster then the 4 speed at which you where burning.
You'd better hope your getting a writer which supports buffer underrun so that your cd doesn't get messed up every time there is a slight hiccup on the network.

Mik

trust me, i've taken all this into acount. The burner I got is a Teac 24/10/40 which has burn-proof. So that should be fine. But thanx for the headsup