hi guy's and gals,
I AM NO EXPERT! but i hope this may help?
I used to run three machine's (thin coax) with internet connection sharing, but then discovered that a low spec machine with two network cards in it
could become a firewall / router.
these machine's were my own, my wife's and the father in law's (just a home setup).
i did have to set up the fourth machine to be a dhcp server for eth1 (but this was handled auto by the mandrake wizard it told me it had to install a few things and it did.
i set eth0 (connected to modem) to receive ip auto (from isp (cable)).
and set eth1 to fixed ip of 192.168.10.1.
all done through the wizards of mandrake 9.1
and on the other three machines i simply configured them to receive ip auto
both in windows and linux (all machines dual boot).
told all machines that 192.168.10.1 was the gateway.
and it ran quite happily for all of six months without a single hitch!!!
(i then purchased a little router box (dlink) and converted to cat5 /rj45)
had shorewall configured with NO services visible to the net.
now i have not succeeded in actually sharing files in linux with any of the other machines so i would not say they are actually networked as such!
but it did allow all three machines to access the net for web and mail and msn messenger (the father in law loves it (he's only 78 years young)).
hope it helps