An office which has only a single Ethernet port has two systems which need to communicate with the Internet. Two potential solutions were considered and tested. They are described below. No configuration changes were needed for either ac01 or ac04.
System administrators hate it when users mess with their network layout.
If they don't control the number and connections of all hubs, they can't be sure their network will be stable. Any problems they do have will be difficult to track down. The IP configuration of each system is changed as described below. Note that this procedure assumes the Linux system is running the 2.2 kernel. Systems running Linux 2.3 or 2.4 should use the NetFilter utility to configure IP masquerading.