On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 14:23, Kaj Haulrich wrote: <Whack> > If everything fails, I will buy a router or let her connect through > my Linux box, eventually, but I'm too lazy and frustrated to set it > up right now. > > I cannot for my souls sake get into my head, that some people > voluntarily runs this garbage OS. > Kaj, I've found that it is dead easy to install a second NIC in the Linux box and let the GUI connection sharing applet do its thing to share the internet with a Windows box. You get (by default) Shorewall and NAT hiding for Windows and a pretty good measure of security. I do this for my own two computers at work, as well as for the department secretary and for a public computer in the office used by faculty and graduate students. In the latter two cases the linux hosts are obsolete old things that are useless for anything else.
I encourage people to do their browsing and email with Linux, but even the ones who refuse to learn anything new (an amazing but prevalent attitude at an academic institution!) are much safer than they would otherwise be because they have a non-routable IP and they're pretty much invisible to most of the 600 or so Computer Science students on _this_ side of the corporate firewall. You can hook up a single Windows machine directly with a cross-over cable or more than one with a cheap hub/switch. It is wise, as you have discovered, to download MS patches on a fully patched machine or on Linux and not to connect the XP machine until it has been fully updated. However, I've had no problems installing XP and patching it with the setup described above. -- N. B. Day
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