[techtalk] many home networking questions

[JLG]

I recently got a cable modem installed in my apartment, and
now I have to make this sharable amongst my computers and my boyfriends.
The modem is connected to a machine running FreeBSD 4. I'm using '@home'
and I am able to connect just lovely using dhcp. I have an additional 
NIC that is detected that is connected to a hub. Connected to this hub is
my other computer (GNU/Linux, Debian) and my boyfriend's computers'-one
running win98 and one running win2k. (poor taste in OS's, but he has a
GREAT personality!)


For the time being I just want every machine to be able to connect to the
internet (drive shares, etc. can wait till after finals!)

1. Do i need to set up samba just to get internet connectivity for the
other machines? Some stuff I read gave me the impression I could just
specify the machine will be a gateway in rc.conf, add entries to
/etc/hosts and use 'route add' to get this working. (big, evil assignments 
are preventing me from doing this gracefully for now)

2. are NAT and IPNAT the same thing? Which is better/newer/easier/more
secure to deal with? It seems like most of the FreeBSD docs I am finding
online are a  little dated. 

3. currently I am using 2 ISA nic's, will there be a noticeable
performance difference if I switch to pci?

4. my nic cards come up in dmesg (and are detected as) ed1 and ed2,
shouldn't this be ed0 and ed1? 


Thanks for reading! any answers, rc.confs/rc.firewalls/samba.confs or
applicable examples are much appreciated.

Jen




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