Hi Deedra: I don't have a great deal more experience with this sort of stuff than you probably do. Nevertheless, what you want is for your desktop to be the gateway to your internal network including your laptop. So you want the external network, the internet, to function on eth0, and you want the internal network to function on eth1. The dhcp server will run off of eth1 as it is servicing the internal portion of the network. The settings used by dhcpd are stored in /etc/dhcpd.conf and this file is read when the daemon starts. Asside from creating the dhcpd.conf file you will also need to edit a file called dhcpd to tell the daemon to listen on eth1 as by defuult it tries to bind itself to all interfaces, I think the line you need for this is as follows if memory serves correctly. #start daemons daemon /usr/sbin/dhcpd dev eth1 Once the notebook is able to pick up an ip address from the dhcp server running on your desktop you will want to configure ip masquerading such that it can use the desktop as its gateway. I have fooled around with this before but I wasn't successful in getting it to work, I primarily fooled with it to save a buck when I was on cable for my internet and I'm on dsl now so once I switched I didn't do much with it as I have several ips nevertheless the most up-to-date info on ip masquerading can be found at either of these urls: http://ipmasq.cjb.net or http://ipmasq2.cjb.net. I believe that those two urls are maintained by the authors of the ipmasqing howto, David Ranch. I appologize Deedra for the fact that I don't have a wealth of personal experience to offer along with the resources I've pointed out, however; I figured they might offer a bit of assistance so I'm sending the stuff anyway. And, due to that fact, this info comes with a big disclaimer, but I think you get the picture. Finally, if I can find a copy of the dhcpd.conf file I used while I was on cable I will send it to you privately, I know that I formatted this system since switching to dsl but there may be a copy of it in the linux directory under my documents on my notebook. Good luck and best regards. Ed Barnes ebarnes at enigma2.cjb.net