Your Server

Can I use a linux server with several ethernet cards to be a router?

What kind of minimum quality of hardware would I need?

Public Comments

1. Are you sure you want a router? Perhaps you are talking about a simple gateway with NAT (network address translation) so that all of you home machines can share one internet connection? Either way is fine because Linux can do both. If for a gateway then you'll need to configure the firewall (most like IPTables) and enable IP forwarding. As for hardware, as long as you are not serving a huge website or have a lot of traffic simple dual-homed setup with any hardware would work just fine. I've been using a 450mhz machine with 256m of ram as my gateway without problems that all. That's including serving my private website and an email host.
2. Yes, Linux is indeed very well suitable to operate as a dedicated router. There are lots of different Linux flavors out there, for convenience you should choose a light-weight distribution. The more full bloated it is, the more time and CPU it will spend with non-routing related tasks and the more vulnerable to security flaws it will be. If you don't want to mess with the network configuration and all the details yourself and prefer to have a quick solution instead, there are a few dedicated Linux distributions that were designed solely to turn your PC into a full-value router: - Freesco Linux Replacement for comercial routers http://www.freesco.info/ - m0n0wall Router / Firewall http://m0n0.ch/wall/ - Coyote Linux http://www.coyotelinux.com/downloads/ - Devil Linux Router / Firewall http://www.devil-linux.org/home/index.php - LRP (Linux Router Project) http://c0wz.steinkuehler.net/ There are lots of other suitable distributions, at the end the decision depends on each one's personal preferences . With this minimum hardware requirements you should be fine (the more load the router becomes, the more RAM you'll need): Processor: 266 MHz RAM: 32 MB HDD: 500 MB (for some dists, you don't need it at all) FLOPPY: convenient NICs: Anyone (don't use realtek - those are lousy)
3. visit star321.21publish.com
4. Yes.
5. Yes you can. You only need to network cards though. One for the "Internet connection" and one for the private network. Just plug the second one into your hub.