Hello, I have a problem with my network at home. I have 2 computers accessing to the internet using LAN and one internet connection. Problem is; server is located 2.5m from my bed. Its fan is worse than an airplane. I am thinking of getting a new computer without a monitor, since doing so will decrease the money that i can spend for other hardware. I will not use it as a server. Instead, cyrix p200 will be the server( afterall it will be used only for ip sharing ). I have only 2 monitors. Therefor I thought that I can install linux into it and administer it remotely from my new machine( for free. Nearly every month magazines are giving new releases of linux here ). With windows98se it was easy to share an ip. Now, I have to do it with linux( in console mode, no xserver ). Is it possible to get it running? How should I configure my LAN and dialup? ( I have never used console to connect to the net ) P.S. I connect to my ISP using PPP/CHAP.

You have to set up something called IP Masquerading. There is an excellent HOWTO document on the topic that should either be in the /usr/docs/HOWTO directory if you have the HOWTOs archive (most distros do..) or at http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/IP-Masquerade-HOWTO.html You''ll then just tell all the other machines on your LAN that the Linux box is the default gateway. Configure the ppp on the Linux box, and you''re up! For help on ppp, check out either the ppp setup program that comes with your distro (I know slackware has pppconfig or something.. I''m sure RedHat does too..) or take a look at the PPP-HOWTO, in the same place that you found the IP-Masquerade-HOWTO, above.

Easier than configuring ppp directly is to use wvdial, it''s definately included in the SuSE distribution, my personal favorite, but should be in Red Hat as well. Provided you are using a recent kernel 2.2.x or 2.3.x, you should be able to configure the masquerading by ipchains.

The bare minimum ipchain commands for masquerading are:

ipchains -P forward DENY
ipchains -A forward -i ppp0 -j MASQ

Ok, techically you don''t need the first one, but it''s good practice.

Also, depending on your distribution you might need to activate forwarding by:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Also it helps if you make sure that the computer can boot without keyboard before you buy it. Some computers will hang during booting if they don''t detect a keyboard.