Hi all,
Thanks for the great advice. I went out and grabbed an SMC barricade router. Plugged my dsl into the WAN port and a couple of XP laptops into the LAN ports and was off to the races, no further futzing required. There is a config interface which I will get to later (if any tweaking is needed) but it was easy as pie right out of the box - 2 minutes to set up.
Two more questions (actually 3 if you count one aside question)
1. I am currently running Mandrake in a vmware window under XP on my dell 8100 laptop until I find a good deal on a used pentium box. VMware is using NAT networking to access the internet over the built in network card - this works without any hiccups. I have an additional pcmcia network card that I can put in if necessary. The question: Will a server run properly out of a vmware window over NAT (while using xp for regular web use) or would it be better to dedicate the pcmcia card to the server?
2. Is paying $30 for dyndns.org have any advantages over any free dyndns services? If not, any recommendations for a free service?
3. An aside - I'm planning on going through the openACS setup this weekend but I noticed in another thread that the beta is basically ready. Is there a release date yet? Any advantage in waiting until then or are any upgrades to the beta pretty painless if I install from cvs this weekend?
Thanks again everyone
