hi... i have installed mandriva 2007 on my box, it has detected my wireless network card(Linksys), labelled it as ra0, my ethernet card as eth0... but when i try to share my internet connection over the hostel LAN(with machine using both XP n linux distros) it shows an error msg as unable to install bind.
can anyone tell me wats wrong , also i wud like to know how to manually configure both d network cards n sharing internet connection.
PS: my box can access the internet properly,n i can ping othr machines on d LAN.

I have no experience with bind, but if your DNS server IP addresses stays constant, I don't know why you would need it. In that case, to share an internet connection all you need to do is to get your NIC/wireless "up," enable ip forwarding, and add either a MASQUERADE (if your external IP address is dynamically assigned) or a NAT (if the IP address is static) instruction to your Linux firewall (via iptables). If you want the other computers on your LAN to be able to automatically configure their IP info via DHCP (as opposed to manually entering the IP info into each computer), then you also need to run dhcpd on the computer sharing the I-net connection.

FYI, you might be interested in looking at this Linux Home Server HOWTO. It is long, but looks quite good and thorough. I believe it was written by one of our fellow LQ members.

tanx,.. but i hav overcome the initial prob by simply deletin my ethernet set up , then usin the net-sharin wizard to set it up again, now im tryin to restrict the users based on their mac addresses!!!