Forum Moderators: phranque
I was not able to find any good documentaion on how to achieve this task. If you have any input on how to create a firewall behind Netgear RT314 I would appreciate it very much.
The RT314 uses NAT which by default creates a firewall. Only requests that originate from within your network can get back to your machine(s). If you want you can set filters to specifically allow only certain machines in or out of your network if you want to make the firewall more robust, but it is really not necessary.
First, insert the settings your ISP requires when connecting to the Internet into the router. If you use a dial up or have a permanent IP address, tell the router, exactly as you needed to tell your local machine, pre-router. It becomes your computer as far as the ISP is concerned.
Next, set each machine on your local network to use DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol), not a fixed IP addresses. This means that each time a networked machine connects to the network, the router can assign it a unique IP. On my machines (Win2K) this is controlled under >Network and DialUp Connections>Local Area Connections>Properties>TCP/IP>Properties. Select "Obtain IP address automatically" and "Obtain DNS server address automatically." How you change these settings will be different (but similar) on other Win versions.
If this is a new network, you will need to add the appropriate "shares" to each machine on the network so they can access each other's data. Also, you won't need to set up Internet connection sharing on networked machines, the router will handle that for you.
