2 Laptops, an old junker with bsd running ip tables and a printer!

So I have two laptops, an old junker that has win98 ( I plan on doing a network install of freebsd on it... ) and I want them to all work together without going to the expense of buying a router.

So far I have the two laptops hooked up via crossover cables. I have an PCMCIA cardbus nic that goes from one of the laptops that I plan on connecting to the junker, and then I plan on giving the junker the internet connection. Do you think it will work, without the router?

I'm assuming that ICS will work for the two windows clients... however, I'm not too sure on how to connect to Windows ( both XP home ) from the bsd side of things.

On one of your laptops you'll have two network connections - one to the other laptop and one to the junker computer. Since this has Windows XP, you should be able to create a bridge between these two connections so that they appear as one, so that the other laptop should be able to communicate with the junker. Once this is working, you should be able to connect the Internet to the junker and set it to be shared. If it has Windows 98 then it should be as simple as enabling ICS and then the other two laptops should both get the Internet and everything should be able to communicate. I imagine the process would be similar with BSD, but not having much experience with it I couldn't really say.

Thanks for that... I think that's going to be the hard part ( BSD to Win XP )