>>http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue54/stoddard.html
>
>Pardon the ignorance, but what's a gateway?

In the context of the article you referenced it is a PC that acts as a 'go between'. At home I have an ADSL phone connection. An RJ-45 cable comes out of the phone socket and attaches to a Cisco 675 router which has DHCP server software embedded in an EPROM. From the Cisco an ethernet cable connects to my PC's 3com509B NIC. The Ciso router costs $375, but probably has only $30 worth of components and software in it. I can replace the Cisco router for about $25 (saving about $350) by purchasing an old 486 DS66 and installing my copy of SuSE 6.3 on it, and running it in the console mode. It is legal to use a single copy of any distro of Linux on as many machines as you wish. I would merely install the Linux OS and such utilities as necessary to create a PC which duplicates the functions of the Cisco router and DHCP server software. Since all traffic to and from the Internet would pass through the 486 on its way to my PC I can call it a 'gateway'. If I had two NICs in the 486 I could hook a second PC to the gateway and both could connect to the Internet via that gateway, sharing the 384Kb bandwidth. The 486 would have the necessary firewalling software installed to prevent crackers from gaining access.

Here is a 'How-To' which explains how to setup a gateway using a RedHat, but it would probably work for any distro:

http://howto.tucows.com/LDP/HOWTO/mini/Home-Network-mini-HOWTO.html

On my Sony VAIO, P166 with 64MB RAM I have Suse installed. I just hooked Cisco cables to the phone jack and my PC, the way the pictures showed (:0), and ran YaST, which is SuSE's system admin utility. I answered a few questions, picked my NIC out of the list, and when it was done I had a working connection to the Cisco router 'gateway'. Had I used a cheap 486 PC, YaST would have made setting it up just as easy. I tested my connection by giving my IP address to www.secure-me.net and after 12 minutes of attempting to gain access using various cracking tools, it responded that it couldn't even tell if there was a computer at my IP address.

Jerry Winegarden is the resident Linux expert and he will correct the mistakes I've made.