[Wylug-help] Linux As A Server For Windows XP Machine

[lists at mungewell.org]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2004 at 09:07:15PM -0000, Thomas wrote:
> Hey,
>
> As it is my home network is like this, I have a combined router/modem which
> just goes straight to all my machines, and as I've just come into possession
> of a new computer I thought I'd turn it into a router/proxy server for all
> the other computers. This is the hard part I don't know which to use. This
> is what I "think" I should do,
> 1. Set the LAN up on the new machine and turn it into a DHCP server, at this
> point there should be etho1 that connects to the net, and etho2 which
> connects to a hub which in turns connects to 3 windows xp machines, with is
> distributed by DHCP.
> 2. At this point I'm lost as of how to get the internet connection on the
> new computer so it can be used on the 3 windows xp machines.
>

Hi Thomas,
There are (always) several ways to skin a cat, it depends on how you
want your network be configured.

The usual way in the Linux world is to 'firewall' the internet
connection and 'NAT' the internal network onto the internet - this means
that the machine with the internet connections forwards the requests
from the other machines to the internet and sends them the reply once it
arrives. This is slightly different than acting as a proxy.

As NAT re-writes the headers in the IP packets there are some protocols
which have trouble or need special modules loaded, any modern linux
distrobution will contain these and probably a configuration to set this
up.

If you choose the proxy route you install/configure the appropriate
proxies and inform the Windows machines to use these (i.e. a web proxy
at http://192.168.1.1:8080 - your linux machine).

NAT has the benefit that the client machines assume they have a direct
connection and you don't have to configure for each-and-every type of
connection.

The real Linux user's way of doing this is to have a seperate (lower
spec machine) acting solely as your firewall/router running a specialised
distrobution such as IP-Cop (or FreeSCO if it's really low spec ;-)

Hope this answers more questions than it raises,
Simon.