On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 9:42 AM, <tdukes at sc.rr.com> wrote: > I had to install 5.5 from scratch and now I have to rebuild my home networking system. > > I haven't had to mess with this stuff in over 5+ years and I'm sure there may be better ways of doing it now. > > My liunx box acts as firewall/gateway for 2 other pcs. I was using a script from the Linux IP Masquerade HOWTO with ddclient (since I have a dynamic ip). > Though there are many benefits to running gateway services through a Linux system, for the past couple years I've opted for an inexpensive wireless router that has been properly secured. It came down to power utilization as the Linux machine used about 10 times as much power as the dedicated router. As to benefits, I do run a Squid proxy server on my network. My internet connection is not the fastest and I've seen pretty good cache hit percentage (hovering near 30%-50%). > Also, I don't think I need a full name server. Can I get by with a caching nameserver? Yes, certainly. However, there are some benefits to running a full nameserver especially if you have any wireless devices that may need to use printers, file servers, etc.. For example, I can connect a wireless laptop and print to HPLaser1 or access the fileshare as \\fileserver\. When I change the fileserver it's a simple matter of pointing my alias over to the new server.