The closest residence is over a quarter mile away, not to mention the road 
is as far as  well, (I live on a farm), so I'm not worried about anyone at 
all hacking my wireless, and as of right now its turned off since I don't 
have any wireless computers. I am probably going to put it between the modem 
and the switch of course, however, do I plug it into the LAN side or the 
internet side of the Linksys?


Jesse







I have to disagree with the statement "learn IPTABLES first, then get
lazy/clever and worry about a front end". I would highly recommend using
a Smoothwall firewall first, and then while the Smoothwall is protecting
your home network, you can play with IPTABLES on another machine. The
last thing you would want to do is make a mistake and open up your
entire network to the Internet.

My $0.02 on the subject of what to do.....Either #1 or #2 below.
#1 - Create a Smoothwall (use v2.0 with all 8 updates, v3 is still beta)
with three (3) NICs. GREEN (LAN), RED (Internet), ORANGE (DMZ). And then
put your Linksys out on the Orange interface as your wireless access
point. That way if someone were to hack your wireless, all they would
have access to is your Internet connection. Not necessarily good, but
better than them having access to your internal network.

#2 - Create a Smoothwall with two (2) NICs, GREEN & RED. Plug the
Linksys in on the LAN side and turn off DHCP (use the Smoothwall as your
DHCP server) and basically just turn it into a simple WiFi access point
and wired switch. If you have WPA encryption turned on with a strong
password and you are not broadcasting your SSID, there is a very slim
chance that someone will even bother to try to hack your WiFi (there are
a lot of unsecured access points out there for them to play with).

You might even consider just using the Linksys as is (or with the
"aftermarket" Linux upgrade) as your firewall/switch and using the PII
machine as a "test" or "play" machine. That way you can play with
different distributions and not have to worry about hosing your primary
computer.
--
Todd Young

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