How Can I Use My Computer As A Router

u did call him your friend, so he cud help ya out. i havent heard anything like that so you could get the info and educate us, we wuld really appreciate dat. chao!

@Poster

You heard right. Your computer could definitely be use as a router. How  you achieve this depends on your routing requirements. In the very simplest form, your computer might already be working as a router (an internet router) if you have ICS enabled to share your internet connection with other computers on the LAN.

However in the more traidtional router sense, you would need a minimum of two NICs, (more depending of the number of networks this computer would be directly connected to) and you'll need to run Windows 2000, 2003 server or a linux flavour (installed in the server mode). All these OS enables you to configure the traditional routing protocols (RIP, OSPF and not forgetting statis routes) to get packets from your source networks to destination networks. The routing components of windows server is RRAS (Routing and Remote Access service).

I am unable to give a blanket installation scenario here and your set up would depend on your requirements (which i'll be happy to expand upon if i know your routing requirements). Regards

Two thumbs up for Internet Connection Sharing.

@Poster

paribus and sakin4life have said just about everything.
Its very possible to run a PC as a router. On Windows, the server OSes would do this. In addition, you should know that software implementation of routing has its relative advantages and disadvantages when compared to the hardware routers. For instance, dedicated hadrware routers are faster because the software routers would still have the process overhead of the OS.

Taking Microsoft Windows Server 2003, when feasible, deploying Windows Server 2003 as routers allows for some distinct advantages over dedicated hardware routers, including lower cost, ease of management, and integration with Windows security and group policies. Meaning, you get features like routing based on user account(hardware routers don't have this feature), access windows/time, and a lot more.

The choice of either is based on your own requirements.

I know it can be done on Windows 2000 and 2003 without any additional 3rd party software. Though I have never tried it out, but there are 3rd party softwares you can get to give windows XP the routing capability. As for the configuration on Linux, I don't know much about that.

Cheers

plz BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY before trying this

@Dave
telling people to tamper with their registry without warning them of the consequences of editing the registry and asking them to backup is unsafe.
Cheers.

@tope,

dont say that. A computer can act as a router. I converted my ex-system into a router and firewall for the systems I have in my house. I used bsd on it before but changed it into the red hat 9.2 when i converted my main system into a unix server. Just as said, software approach has its advantages and disadvantages when compared to the hardware approach but i think i still prefer the earlier cos i could tune the routing and firewall levels to my taste. I could have the system trace back an attack to someone who is even under the cover of a proxy, but dont let us get down too much here, @poster, it is very very and 100% possible just need to take your time to set it up. Shikena.

@tope, It probably skipped your mind. Anyways, One love.