I've been using cable behind an IPMASQ for almost a year now. I've had some attempts at accessing my MASQ machine, but no breaches that I've detected. The router is a 150 MHz Cyrix. Speed of the router is not much of an issue and I think a 486 should be able to handle all the traffic you could possibly put through your cable modem.
You do need 2 ethernet cards for the IP MASQ router and you might need a hub for the local net. Also, using 10B2 for your local net won't result in any speed decrement. You do accrue a small latency for each router you add in the chain, but it is usually insignificant.
Set up of the IP MASQ is pretty simple. Check the HOW-TO. The only protocol that gave me significant difficulties was irc because of ident. There is a workaround for it though.
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I've been using cable behind an IPMASQ for almost a year now. I've had some attempts at accessing my MASQ machine, but no breaches that I've detected. The router is a 150 MHz Cyrix. Speed of the router is not much of an issue and I think a 486 should be able to handle all the traffic you could possibly put through your cable modem. You do need 2 ethernet cards for the IP MASQ router and you might need a hub for the local net. Also, using 10B2 for your local net won't result in any speed decrement. You do accrue a small latency for each router you add in the chain, but it is usually insignificant. Set up of the IP MASQ is pretty simple. Check the HOW-TO. The only protocol that gave me significant difficulties was irc because of ident. There is a workaround for it though.