Tony Yarusso wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 28, 2009 at 4:29 PM, swede<danyberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> This was short notice and is my first attempt at setting up anything other a
>> home network, so any other ideas for the layout would be appreciated.
> 
> If security is your concern, you want to take the switch out of the
> equation (unless it's a smart/managed switch) and add more interfaces
> to the IPCop router (one for each of the 4 places that need to be kept
> separated).

  If one has a managed switch, they generally support 802.1q VLANs. 
Rather than having a NIC for each network, you can just assign each port 
on the switch to a separate VLAN, and trunk all of the VLANs to the 
Linux box.  For that matter, you can connect the uplink to a VLAN of its 
own on the switch, too.
  I have such a setup running six disparate networks to a Linux router 
with only one ethernet interface, which can therefore be replaced by any 
hardware if needed (and not just a device with sufficient PCI* slots). 
Also, adding additional networks is a breeze as long as you have enough 
switch ports (and you could always trunk to another switch).

  It's a tad bit involved, but I'm pretty fond of the setup, myself.

      Jima