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 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list