I suspect this would be a commonnly asked question but here we go. It may be appropriate to move this to the lounge or somthing?

I have 3 PC's

Win98 is connected to my cable modem, Then another Win98 and my Win2k are using the ICS.

I am not hot on security but what should i do to secure the network? Will the win98 box be sufficient to stop mallicious people getting into my network?

Should i install a firewall on teh ICS box?

Thanks all.

The best thing to do, IMHO, would be to hook the cable modem up to the Win2k box, and then install something like ZoneAlarm on it. I'm sure there are FAQ's out there on how to configure ZoneAlarm to co-exist with ICS.

You could put ZoneAlarm on the Win98 machine too, but you'll probably get better ICS performance out of Win2k

You should look at wingate (I will try to dig up the URL), it's a NAT Routing software with a built in firewall. ICS is very inefficent from what I have seen.

How are the pc's connected? Just a hub or do you have a router? If you have a router, it probably has a firewall built in. Just a matter of configuring it. If you dont have a router.. I have nothing to offer really other than installing ZoneAlarm on the comp w/ the connection. Would also look into WinGate like RackMy said.