Hey guys I have an old P3 box that I installed red hat 9.0 on. Basic cable internet setup. I am going to use the linux box as my firewall. So the cable would come in from the wall through the modem into my linux box out my linux box into a switch/router and to the different computers. I have a few quetions anyone of them would be greatly appreciated to be answered:

1.) Know anywhere I can get some idea of what is needed to do this as far as confirgin the network. (i.e. manual). on both the windows and unix machines, not sure how well they talk to each other

2.) will I need a static IP for the linux box? If so I figure I would need two (one for the IP and the other for a gateway?)

3.) what do u think of this solution?

thanks.

any ideas?

anyone?

Hi Newschoolskier,

I really can't say that I know that much about Linux. I have looked into doing what you are working on but haven't done much with the information.

I can tell you that you will need to have two NICs installed in the firewall and that each will need to have an IP address bound to it. The NIC that is connected to the modem will have to have the IP assigned by your ISP, either by DHCP or as a fixed IP that your ISP assigns. The other NIC will need an IP that comes from the pool that the rest of the network is using.

I'm not sure that you will need the router functions with this configuration but you may need to set the Linux box as the DHCP server for your network. If you are only going to use this for a firewall (and DHCP server?), I don't think that there will be much that you need to worry about as far as communication between the Windows and Linux machines.

The Internet is a very great resource for finding information about Linux. If anything it can be hard to sort out what you want from what you find.
Just typing "Linux firewall" into Google gave me 7 million hits.


ZZ