Thank you Brian and Ron. This is very informative.

I'm off to look for NetGear. Maybe I'll have some questions later.

Alex

>PMFJI here, but if set up properly, TCP/IP will be fine. www.grc.com is an excellent resource for checking your configuration and I always use it for confirmation. One of the key things that you want to make sure of is to disable IP Forwarding.
>
>Personally, I've had very good luck with NetGear products. Their switches and hubs have been extremely reliable and are afforadable. On the other hand I would stear away from LinkSys. One office I was in had so many problems with their hubs and switchs that we just replaced everything with NetGear. I think that Ron also meant that you want a name-brand NIC for your server. I've had excellent reliability with 3COM.
>
>Regarding Firewalls (and I'll also assume you'll want Proxy so you can share the service), it comes down to what you want to spend. And you can go with either hardware or software. Hardware solutions, and many software ones, will have a cost depending on the number of users. Cheaper ones will also be limited to the number of users.
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>Although it is usually rare that this is the case, but ZoneAlarm is one of the cheapest solutions, but a very good one. It's free for personal use and about $40-50 for business use last time I checked. That coupled with WinProxy can make for a good, scalable software solution, especially if you can't afford a server. Both can be set up and run through a single PC with two NIC's.
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>For middle of the road, MS Proxy Server 2.0 or better yet ISA Server 2000. The nice thing about them are you only have to get one license for the server they are installed on. Any number of users can access the internet without additional cost. I know many will roll their eyes at the mention of Microsoft and security used in the same sentence, but ISA server has gotten some very good reviews. Both allow dynamic IP Packet Filtering and should definitely enable this feature. I've configured and run both to achieve "stealth" results on www.grc.com.
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>I'll stop here for now. Hope this helps you out some.
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>- Brian
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>
>
>>Thank you very much for your answer, Ron.
>>
>>So far I have avoided using TCP/IP in my network in order to increase security per Gibson Research (grc.com) recommendation, but there are too many reasons to go IP, and this is just one more, so I'll surrender.
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>>What other recommendations can you make in this regard? I assume a good NIC on the server means 100mb ethernet, or is there something else ?
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>>Do you have a specific switch recommendation? about 16 connections plus cable or DSL to Internet with a *good* firewall.
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>>Appreciate your help.
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