[Sderby] Worthwhile setting up DHCP and DNS servers?

[daverobinson2 at supanet.com]

Dear All,

Hello everyone, new bloke for the list, with a couple of questions.

We're in the process of setting up a3-box LAN at home, a soon-to-be SUSE 8.2
and a 
windoze xp both using another SUSE 8.2 with a pair of network cards as a
gateway 
to our NTL broadband.  So far the gateway box is up and running after a few
amusements, will be hooking it up to the broadband today.  

Thinking about it and reading around, we're wondering if it'd make sense to
set up a 
DNS server on the gateway box - the theory being that it'll cache the
addresses we're 
looking for and so cut down the number of requests we're pushing out to the
busy and 
tired ISP's servers.  Do any of you have any experience of this and/or words
of advice?

The other question is whether to set up the LAN to have static IP adresses or
to have
the gateway box act as a DHCP server as well as a client, handing out local
made-up
addresses.  The driving force behind this is about to go away, as my partner's
just about
to leave the job that gave her a laptop, but you never know for the future.  

The gateway box has got buckets of memory and free disc space, and it isn't
going to
be doing a fat lot other than connecting us to the outside world: more a
question of
"is it worth the hassle" than resources.

Oh, and another thing.	She won't move from XP, but it'd be handy if we could
set up an
X server on her PC.  She let me put vi on it (though she has to look away when
I use it), 
so she won't object - does anyone know of a decent and robust shareware X
server for XP?

Shameless brain-tapping, sorry about that.  

Cheers -- Dave