Here's the basic concept: Your Linux box with IP Masquerade will serve as a mouthpiece to the Internet. Inside your home network you'll have many computers, each with a different IP address. But to the outside world (the Internet), it will appear that all the requests are coming from the address supplied by your ISP. IP Masquerade will make sure all the requests make it to the proper place.
In addition, it will be difficult for machines on the Internet to access machines on your home network. This configuration may even be more secure than a normal firewall.
For all you Dilbert fans, think of it this way: You're going to have a house full of Elbonians (computers) that can only talk to Dilbert (Linux), who then repeats the comments (packets) of each Elbonian to the Pointy-Haired Boss (Internet). When the Pointy-Haired Boss responds, Dilbert is smart enough to remember which Elbonian asked the question the Boss answered and delivers it to the correct Elbonian. As long as the Elbonians keep their questions simple they will never know the difference between Dilbert and the Boss.
The hardware requirements here are similar to those listed in my A Server of Your Own article. However, two network cards are strongly advised for performance, security, and ease of expansion. When I went shopping for a second network card, the 3Com 10 Mbps cards I recommended in the last article were nowhere to be found. I didn't really need a US$120 10/100 3Com card, so I settled on a Bay Networks NetGear FA 310tx 10/100 PCI card, which cost $29.99. Every computer store I went to had piles of them, and this card works well for me. I will include configuration information for people who have to use a single network card.
If you need to install Linux, you can follow the instructions in my previous article. Note that the installation I documented was for version 5.2, and RedHat's most current release is 6.0. But there's not much difference in the installation, so my instructions should be fine. In this article I'll assume you're running version 6.0.
Your home network could be configured many ways, so I'm going to describe what I believe to be the most common setup. You have a box with some flavor of telephone line (including DSL) attached to it. That box and every other box on your network is connected to a hub.
I don't have access to a cable modem, so I can't tell you exactly how to make it work. The best I can do is point you to the Cable Modem mini-HOWTO.
Let's get started.
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