I need advice on the best way to configure my small office network. I have a connection to a DSL router with DHCP running - its address is 192.168.0.1 so that is my gateway. I have an IBM Netfinity server running Windows 2000 with SP3 and dual NICs that acts as my domain controller. I also have 3 client PCs and a 5-port switch. Originally I had the incoming Ethernet cable going to the External NIC on my server, then had the other cable on the Internal NIC going to the switch, and the 3 clients connected to the switch as well. I tried running RRAS and it worked, but many of my client Internet requests timed out. Also FTP never worked from the clients. Now I have the cable coming from the router going directly to the switch, with the external NIC on the server going to the switch as well. Now Internet connectivity is fine but I can't log onto the local network anymore. So in short how should I physically connect my network so that a) all clients have full Internet access and b) all clients can connect to the local domain/LAN and access the files on the W2K server? Secondly, what should be running on the server if the dual NICs are used? TIA.

First disable the second nic on your domain controller it is not needed. Just plug the domain controller directly into the switch. I would suggest turning off DHCP on the router and give all of your networked pcs static IP addresses. This should not be too difficult to manage since you only have 5. Give them all 192.168.1.x ip addresses with 255.255.255.0 net mask. Set DNS server on the pcs to the IP address of your DC (assuming it is the DNS server) and set up your DNS on the Domain Controller to foreward to your ISPs DNS server(s). Your PCS will then be able to find the services they need using the local DNS server, and any query which can not be resolved by the local DNS will be forewarded to the ISPs DNS server.