Re: Making linux firewall/gateway

On Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:01:15 -0700, Robert wrote:

> Hi all...
> Im in need of some advice. I have an idea for replacing the annoying
> linksys box that I have currently for sharing my cable internet
> connection. This is really for a learning experience, and Im looking
> forward to building and configuring it. I wanted to keep the unit small
> so I purchased a mini-itx mainboard and a nice case. Its slightly larger
> than the linksys box but the capabilities of the linux box are far
> greater than the linksys and the increase in size is well worth it. The
> motherboard has one on-board 10/100 ethernet port (my internet
> connection), and it has one pci slot. I was wondering if I could use a
> four-port pci NIC in the one PCI slot (since I have 4 PCs at home, I can
> use this interface for my internal LAN), and configure the routing table
> to make it act as the linksys built in switch. Wow, thats a mouthful.
> Hope I didnt lose you yet :-) .....
>
> I also want to offer DHCP services so i will run dhcpd on it to serve
> addresses on the local LAN (4-port NIC). But how can I configure
> routing if perhaps a clients IP changes? Will the routing table adjust
> itself?
>
> And of course I will configure masquerading for NAT.
>
> Any other ideas for my linux box would be greatly appreciated....
>
> Thanx
> Rob

A regular NIC card and an external switch will be cheaper than a four port
ethernet card (assuming you can even find one). The only four port card
that I've heard of is an Alacritech, I don't know if they still make it,
they might just be making accelerated gigabit cards now.