Can the provider see Cable Modem connection sharing?

OK. I'm getting a new internet connection next week. Something a bit faster that will replace my US Robotics 56k EXT FAX modem 8). I've been talking to the provider if I can hook up 2 computers via switch. They said that that's not allowed so I'm wondering is there a way they can find out. What if I do an internet connecion sharing in xp's instead of a swithch. Does anyone know more about this?

And what is better switch, router, hub and what is the difference?

Thanks

Im not allowed to have two connections on mine either but i did have it setup as me connecting to my mams comp to go online, then we bought an Netgear Router for £60 that came with 2 NIC cards for free and it works wonderfully and allows me to have an ftp also

Get a router. It will connect you to the cable modem and give you good network performance between your computers. I got a belkin 4port... very nice.

yes, they can tell if you have a router or not...routers typically use NAT which sends requests on a much higher port number than the standard port 80 (for http requests). so if they do monitor the traffic, they can find out if they want to

Wouldn't a caching/proxy server such as ISA be able to circumvent that? All port 80 requests would be forwarded to a single IP, the ISA server...

yeah, but I think he just wanted a router : )
a linux box with squid and a firewall would do the trick I bet but I am in
the wrong forum for that : )

Jasbo, you're right about the original poster just wanting a router, I guess I let my mind wander.

If you haven't already, you may be interested in checking out http://www.linuxcompatible.org. It's NT Compatible's sister site, and the user database is shared, so there's no need to re-register. Also, there are several of us who are also interested in Linux/BSD solutions. Welcome to the forums!

thanks for the nice welcome....I have been a daily visitor to the site for over a year now but just recently started regularly reading the forum. It is a great site!

Thanks for the replies. I checked for a router but it's too expensive (for now), I'll try microsoft's connection sharing.

Jasbo I'm also running SuSE 8.0 on the second machine and I doubt that microsoft connection sharing would do any good. Can I configure a linux machine to act as a router?

yes, you can and rather than go into a deep description, I will just point you to the suse page where you should find everything you need to know... lots of luck and have fun

http://sdb.suse.de/cgi-bin/sdbsearch_en.cgi?stichwort=router&searchtype=and