>Thanks for the reply,
>
>I am using a dial up connection. I see that both steinkuehler and bbiagent are for broadband connections. Do you think that these will work for a dial up connection? And do I need that for a dial up connection?
>

I cannot tell you from personal experience. I do know that pleny of people are doing it, and there is a fairly active mailing list that provides support, in which I believe one of the authors participates. But again, your mileage may vary as I have not done it myself.

As for needing it, the nice thing about it is that it gives you a dedicated firewall router, independent of your other machines. Because it runs on a 486, you do not need to tie up a better machine that could become a desktop Linux box for you.

One word of advice though, if you go this route, definitely go spend $20 on a newer PnP PCI net card, you do not want to be messing around with an ISA card for this.

>Thanks
>
>>>I have two computers at home on a win2000 peer to peer network.
>>>Can I set up a third computer with Linux and a modem to use as a firewall to connect both win2000 computers to the web?
>>>
>>>TIA
>>
>>Yes. Check out this link: http://lrp.steinkuehler.net. I used this system with no prior experience in Linux and got it going with no problems.
>>
>>There are many upsides, no downsides:
>>1. The firewall can run on a 486. I myself have it running on a P90 w/32Meg of RAM.
>>
>>2. No HDD or CD required. The entire bootable Linux system runs from a floppy. Once you get it the way you want it, you write-protect the floppy. Now, even if a cracker got onto the actual firewall box, there is simply no possible way for them to physically commit any changes to your system. If a cracker did get in and munge your firewall, just reboot and presto! back to the way it should be.
>>
>>3. Various dial-up protocols are well-supported, though I use two ethernet cards for my DSL.
>>
>>4. It is out-of-the box a firewall.
>>
>>5. It supports masquerading out-of-the-box, so your two Win2k machines will be able to use the WWW.
>>
>>6. By changing a few well-documented scripts, you can enable "port forwarding", which allows one of the Win2k machines to be a web server and still be reachable from behind the firewall. though if you are using dial-up, you may have no need for this. I do this to allow a Win2k machine that is behind the firewall to be a web server, and another Linux box behind the firewall to be my mail server.
>>
>>7. Set your Win2k machines up to be DHCP clients and you are in business. They do not know or care that your firewall is not Windows.
>>
>>Hope this helps, good luck!