General Questions

[DSL modem -- monowall -- host 1 | host 2]

I am thinking about setting up my old computer with monowall.  Can you put multiple nics in the monowall to have it act as the switch, or is it necessary to have a switch to hook the hosts up to?  This is what I was proposing:

DSL modem -- monowall -- host 1
                                  |
                              host 2                                  
                                 
or does it have to be:

DSL modem -- monowall -- switch -- host 1
                                                   |
                                              host 2

Please let me know...
Also, if anyone wants to offer any other useful advice before I start, please let me know.

You can use multiple nics and have separate subnets but you need to be aware of the need to make rules to cover this.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't need to have separate subnets, you can just bridge additional interfaces together ... which is kind of what a switch does.

You can only bridge one interface. So you could have a second port on the same broadcast domain as the LAN, but no more than 2. For anything above 2 you need separate subnets.

Processing all traffic between internal hosts through a firewall will incur a serious performance penalty unless you have a fast box or very little network traffic. Hence you probably don't want to use it as a "switch" anyway.