[josh_johnson]

I set up a network similar to what Gadget described and it worked well, the advantages of this over bus topology include:

*Being more reliable (If one connection goes down it doesn't break the connection to the other computers, unless of course that computer is the one with the dial-up coming into it)

*Requires only one NIC per computer (I believe bus topology requires two on any except the ends, however it has the added cost of the hub, switched, or router)

There are probably more advantages as well as disadvantages that I can not think of now.

With Windows XP you can set up the computer with the dial-up to shape the connection and even to automatically dial-up if another computer tries to access the internet.