On Tue, 27 Mar 2001, Jason Majors wrote: > You could run a box with lots of ip masquerading to emulate a hub, but > that's like swatting flies with a hammer. Just get a hub. It's > cheaper, uses less power, and allows your boxes to see each other more > easily.
Actually in such a case you would want to use either ordinary bridging or routing among the various home systems. You don't need to masquerade the local systems to each other. One thing I forgot to mention clearly in my other post is that you *do* need a box to proxy the traffic of the others on the Internet, regardless of whether you use a hub or a box-of-NIC's. If you have an analog modem, you haven't really got a choice; the system that has the modem in it does the proxying because you can't share that. But if you have DSL or Cable that looks like ethernet to your computer, you have two ways to do it: Either plug the DSL/Cable modem into the hub, or plug it into a computer and then use another NIC in that system to communicate with the internal network. Do it the second way. Otherwise, all your internal network traffic goes over your Internet connection. Not only is this bad for your privacy, it ties up the connection, which is likely to irritate your ISP. Especially if you have cable, doubly so if your cable company is one that tries to prevent you from sharing the connection among multiple systems.
