Internet Connection Sharing
 

Hi, I have 2 pcs. One PC is running purely Redhat 9. The other one is running RH9 while dual booting with WinME. I wanted to share the internet connection between the two PCs. Obviously the machine that is solely running RH9 is going to be my gateway while the dual booting pc is going to be my client.

From what info I have gathered is that I will have to install 2 NICs in my gateway(it already has 1). And I need to use SAMBA to share my files over my internal LAN. The two PCs arent too far apart. They are just about 20feet or so apart. I had connected my PCs in a LAN a while ago but thats when I had M$ WinME running on both systems. So I already have the cabling and other stuff.

Now I just need to know:
1. how to go about configuring the NICs on both my machines.
2. how to share files over my internal LAN using SAMBA in both Linux -> Linux and Linux -> Windows configurations.
3. how to share my internet again in both Linux -> Linux and Linux -> Windows configurations.
4. how to secure SAMBA against unauthorised access into my systems.

The Linux -> Linux and Linux -> Windows configuration means, that I have the gateway running Linux while the other machine might be running the Windows OS or Linux OS =P.

PS.: This is just a side question, but I have 2 old PCs which I can use as the gateway. One is a P3(450MHz, 192MB RAM) and the other is a P1(166MHz, 64MB RAM). I am planning to keep the gateway on 24x7. I might rarely shut it down or reboot. So from the power consumption and performance point of view which machine should I use?

[Edit] What is IP masquerading?

samba to windows
 

I am not an expert on samba but i have set it up several times. there is a gui in red hat fedora under system settings then under server settings. if not you have to go to the
/etc/samba directory. in this directory open a shell and type smb and hit the tab key several times. this will give you a list of the commands. here you can use smbpasswd to add users
ofter adding users type. then you need to do a smbd restart command.
you also need to edit the samba .conf file and where it says windows work group, put in the windows work group, rreplacing their text. the gui is the best way if you have or can install


well those are the basics. I dont know about the security, I dont understand myself

Hello,
IP masquerading is usually when you use one computer to connect and share multiple computers with one Internet connection. The computer doing the ipmasqurading takes packets coming from the computers sharing the connection and rewrites them to look like they are all coming from the same computer. When it receives packets back from the Internet, it then rewrites them and sends them to the correct computers that are sharing the connection. To set your computer up to do this I recommend using a program called guidedog. If you want to set up a firewall to go with it I recommend its sister program gaurd dog. Both programs require xwindows to setup, but not necessary to use after. As for which computer to use you definitely do not need anything spectacular to simply route and block traffic I believe redhat gives you the option to install it on older hardware giving you only what is needed for the task. Unfortunatly that will not give you a gui, and I cannot remember if redhat provides a more minimalist desktop like afterstep or icewm that will run acceptably on an old pentium. There other options you can look out for as well, there are many distributions that are built solely for this purpose check out smoothwall or the linux routing project. Sincerely, Dan