In article <1192378273.281636.258870@y27g2000pre.googlegroups .com>,
Nick <dpratte@dpratte.com> wrote:
>I have been assigned a subnet mask by my ISP of 255.255.255.248.

I find the CIDR notation /28 easier to write but thats just my
personal preference.

>If I'm understanding subnetting, which I'm new to, this means I have
>a network address of xxx.xxx.xxx.8, a gateway of xxx.xxx.xxx.9 and a
>broadcast of xxx.xxx.xxx.15. That leaves 5 addresses I can use for
>hosts, e.g. xxx.xxx.xxx.10 - xxx.xxx.xxx.14.

Check with your ISP and find out if they assigned a /30 or /31 address
for the routers 'outside' interface. If so you've got six addresses at
your disposal.

>Now I want to assign 3 of the public addresses to hosts, and one
>public address to a wireless DLINK router which supports NAT,
>etc. for a LAN. Question: can I assign xxx.xxx.xxx.9 as a gateway to
>each host, wheter router or NIC?

Not knowing what equipment you've got or planning to get its kinda
hard to give specifics but, the gateway address has to be on the same
subnet as one of the hosts interfaces. So if the routers 'inside'
interface has xxx.xxx.xxx.9/28 as its address and your hosts have
addresses in the xxx.xxx.xxx.8/28 subnet then yes, they should have
xxx.xxx.xxx.9 as their gateway address.

--
-- Rod --
rodd(at)polylogics(dot)com