Small home network

[eam]

I want to connect my three computers so they can share an internetconnection and access each other's files. One computer is XP, one is Win98, and the last is RH 8. I don't have any idea how to start. Will the OS differences be a problem? If someone could point me in the right direction it would be great.

Thanks.

[linuxdude]

not at all. For windows xp and 98 just set that up normally. Eitehr plug it in to the router or have the wlan card working correctly and you should see it. After that for rh8 go to www.samba.org and get that working right or just follow this tutorial http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba.html I have samba working on Gentoo Kernel verson 2.4.22 no problem at all.

[Waldo2k2]

not to jump on your case...but it's kind of annoying when 2 people ask the same question within a few posts of eachother....
Linux and Windows FileShare?

as a rule of thumb, do a board search first. Lots of newb's get fried up around here for that kind of stuff

[eam]

I don't have a router. How do I check if I have a wlan card? And what do I hook it up with?

Waldo2k2: Will do next time, but that thread only answers half of my question.

Maybe I made it sound like the OS difference was all I needed to know. I'm talking about the whole thing in general, like what I need get, and how to set it up.

[kevinj]

A wlan card, is a wireless card, if you don't know what one is, then the chances of having one are pretty slim manafacturers don't normally ship wireless cards with the computers.

To hook a wlan card up, you'd have to hook it up to something like a WAP (wireless access point), which to my knowledge is either connected to another computer (main host) or a hub.

This is how i'd go about doing things, buy 3 NIC cards + hub, from any electronics store, check the boxes or ask the person behind the counter to see if that specific card is supported by linux - lynksys would be a good choice.

install all your stuff, connect every computer to the hub, set them into the same work group & subnet (255.255.255.0), and assign them an ip 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2 etc, by now you should be able to ping each host, if you can't dbl check everything.

Assuming everything is working perfect, setup squid on your linux server (which has the inet), once that is done, set the proxy settings in IE on your windows machines to the ip of the linux server which you'd have it has 192.168.0.1 for example.