Linux Networking to Share Cable Connection?

Hi,
I've got a wireless router set up to a cable modem and this is shared by two pcs. ATM its running on its own, I'd like to hook it up through a pc - don't know why prefer the idea of a pc running the firewall, and the this being shared than relying on everyobe to set up their own fw.

A friend suggested using Smoothwall linux on the server pc. I wanted to know if it is possible to put quotas on the amount each user can d/l per month. there
s 4 of us and someone always uses much more so to make it more equitable and payment less hassle would be great. if what what can i do?

 

Just so you know, the router has a built in firewall you don't actually need to run a software firewall on any of the computers when behind a router. Quite often the routers firewall is better then the software firewalls anyways.

You can do what you want, but it's very odd to go from a router to a computer acting as a router. The accepted practice is to use a router.

At any rate you can just configure NAT on the linux box to share the connection but then you'd have to plug the other computers into the linux box rather then the router and I doubt it has that many nics. You could always disable DHCP on the router, and use it as a switch in order to plug all the computers into the server, but yet again that's just getting weird.

 

thaks for the reply. I thought it was more common to run a pc as a server,, than use the router as a access point - i know more people who do this than use the router alone. The main thing that I want to do is be able to put a quota onto each of use. one guy d/l'd 5 gig yesterday, almost half our months quota.

Is there a way to do this using the wireless router as an access point or would it have to run off a server to do this?

 

It all depends on how good of a router you have. Some can do quota's and some can't. You'll have the read the manual for your router. If it can't there might be an upgrade for it which adds it as a feature.

If not then you'd have to use a server.