I have finally ventured into the task of setting up my home network, and I have a few questions to ask. This is what I have: 3 pc's, a 5 port switch, nic cards, and cat 5 cable. As of now, my pc's are not networked, and I have DSL on one of my pc's, and would also like to share it with the other two pc's. Before posting, I searched the forums, and read up a lot of stuff and I get the overall picture; however, I have questions on specific details. 1st question: How Will I have to connect the pc's to the switch? I read that I can use ICS to share the dsl connection, but I dont know if the current dsl line will stay as is in the main pc, and then the others will connect thru this one, and would i need to plug in an additional nic card into this computer? Or, do i have to plug in the dsl line on the "uplink" port on the switch, and then connect all the 3 pc's to the switch ports? I am really stuck on this one, it is my most important question. 2nd question: How will I assign the IP's to each computer? My DSL provider assigned me static ip address, but I dont know how the ip addressing will be once I network my computers. 3rd question: While I was doing my research regarding this matter, I went into a computer chat room, and someone told me that my dsl provider might find out that i'm sharing my dsl with other computers in my house, and penalize me. Is this true ?? And if so, how will I have to do this, so that my dsl provider wont know I am networking my house? I find this kind of lame by the companies, because I am paying over $50 a month for my DSL, and I cant even network my own house? My provider is DSLextreme Thank you so much to everyone in advance, for taking the time to read this, and for helping others who are just learning. Thank you to everyone. Please provide me with any other additional information that is important. PS: and yes, I have visited dslreports.com, practicallynetworked, and all those networking sites, thanx

I went to yahoo.com and did a search on "internet connection sharing how-to". Below are the first five webpage matches. All look like decent tutorials. There were many more. But I'd guess that in these pages will be some good details of how to setup. I don't use ICS but do share my cable modem with 4 PCs via another method using a Linux PC. My guess is that your main PC will have 2 NICs. One will be connected to the DSL modem and have the IP address given to you by the DSL company. The other NIC and the NICs in the other PCs will be connected to the switch and have IP address' from the 192.168.1.* family. And each of the PCs will be setup with the DSL company IP address as their 'gateway' IP. The tutorials should explain this. http://www.annoyances.org/win98/features/ics.html http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q234/8/15.ASP http://www.infinisource.com/techfiles/ics.html http://www.zdnet.com/zdhelp/stories/main/0,5594,2279694,00.html http://www.practicallynetworked.com/