very basic help/what doc to read

[clintpatty]

I know nothing about home networking. I recently had to upgrade due to a bad power supply, and if I can scrounge up enough used parts locally, I will end up with 2 boxes. This means that my Mandrake 9.2 box will be dedicated to mom. The connection is DSL and it will soon be running on Gentoo. I have a PCI NIC for the theoretical mom's comp. I also have a built in NIC for the Gentoo box and a PCI NIC to put in it. I don't want to buy any hardware. My idea is to connect the DSL to the onboard NIC and use both PCI NICs with a crossover CAT5 to allow mom's computer to use the DSL through mine. How do I go about this? Does it have something to do with SSH? I don't know anything about this, if so, and I would like to know where to start reading. I think I will also need to enhance security if I do that. In the past I've only ran CUPS and Apache, and for the last year+ I've only ran Apache, so I haven't been very picky on security.

[LoDown]

No, it wouldn't use SSH, the solution would be IPTABLES masquerade. I am not sure where to point you, but googling that should bring some good results. However, the solution I would go for would be to buy a cheap router (Linksys, etc). IPTABLES is actually how something like the Linksys WRT-54g operates, but it does so transparently. They are only like $40US anymore, so not expensive.

[John R. Graham]

The hardware you don't want to buy is called a "router". However, Linux can act as a router. There's a nifty-looking howto here on the Gentoo site on how to set this up:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml

I confess that I haven't set this up myself. I have a hardware router from US Robotics that cost me about $30 on eBay and, in general, I like being able to run vanilla networking on my boxes as much as possible. Among other benefits, the Gentoo Live CD finds my network and thence the Internet automatically.

Best of luck.

- John