I noticed my Asus mboard has LAN and WAN style jacks for networking.. that's like 2 built-in NIC's, I think.

1) Do RedHat 9 Linux drivers work with these?
2) If any Distro's drivers work with both on board NIC's, is it possible to use one to go to my DSL modem and the other NIC to connect to another computer's NIC?
3) If #2 is possible then how would I set up such a thing, assuming I'm using RH9 as an OS?

Thanks.

1) The onboard NIC that is part of the nForce2 chipset requires either nVidia's own driver (available from their site, I think a RH9 driver is available) or the "forcedeth" module available in kernel 2.6.3 or later (or a patched 2.4 series kernel). The other NIC is a 3com-based one, and uses the "3c59x" kernel driver module, which has been in the kernel for quite some time now I believe. Try modprobe 3c59x and watch the last few lines of dmesg output to see if the driver loads correctly.

2+3) Yes. In order to access the Internet from the second computer you will need to set up network address translation, or NAT for short. I don't know if Redhat has graphical tools for this but it wouldn't surprise me since they have that for pretty much anything.


Håkan

To heck with GUI's... even if RedHat has a GUI I'd rather know how to set up a NAT on the command line. I've done enough open heart surgery on Linux to understand doing this if it is explained clearly.

What tools do I need to set up a NAT? My Asus machine will be the one that accesses the net while the other machine is going to be a back end server. All it will do is serve files.. it doesn't need to see the net if I can avoid it.

You could start by reading the IP Masquerade HOWTO and search LinuxGazette and LinuxJournal for articles on NAT and iptables.


Håkan

Hey I got this sucker to work. Took only 2 days of figuring it out