Are you wanting to do this with just the existing hardware, or would be
adding some really cheap extra hardware be possible?
As far as extra hardware, I can recommend two routes.
If these machines are wireless capable, you can share a dial-up
connection using an Orinoco Residential Gateway model RG-1000, which has
Ethernet input or can use an built-in internal 56K modem. I did this for
a while, and then moved up to the next recommendation. (These RG-1000
units are no longer made, but are available cheaply used.)
If you have access to a toss-away junk old PC, you may want to think
about setting up a stand-alone hardware firewall for dial-up sharing.
You can use almost any junk PC for the job, and run the simple to set up
IP Cop dedicated firewall Linux distribution. I used this for years on
dial-up, sharing with up to 6 machines. It's got a lot of advantages,
caching DNS, transparent proxy, persistent dial-up connection, and a lot
more, that really speed up the dial-up experience. You'd need an
external serial modem and an Ethernet switch on the firewall's Ethernet
output, but the setup works really slick. And, you don't have to redial
when rebooting machines. If you have to use dial-up, this is a *really*
nice improvement. (I also had wireless access via the IP Cop firewall on
dial-up, using the RG-1000 wireless access point then in bridged
Ethernet mode, in addition to wired Ethernet.)
I've since converted IP Cop to cable broadband after it became available
here in my area.
I can send along more details if you want to give this a shot.
Rick Kunath
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