Protecting An Obsolete Computer

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

I am doing some video work on the side, mainly conversion of old VHS video tapes to digital video. You may not realize this, but the best hardware and software for doing this was produced around the turn of the century for Win2000 and XP. Vista broke a lot of the drivers, and Windows 8 broke a whole lot more, so the good stuff isn’t usable on modern computers.

I have (or am going to have) two Windows XP computers which will be devoted to nothing but capturing…no browsing the Internet, no games, nothing else. However, I want to be able to transfer some big files to the servers…a two-hour VHS video tape can run 25GB, uncompressed. My routers are an hAP-ac (main router) and an RB3011 (currently used only as a bridge). I have two Synology servers on the LAN which I want the two XP machines to be able to communicate with freely. I don’t want any other machine, and especially the Internet at large, to even see the two XP machines…and vice versa. If I need software or some patch from the Internet, I’ll download it to a folder on one of the Synologys and download it to the XP machine from there. Likewise, after I finish capturing a tape, I’ll upload it to the server and then access it from there on the computer(s) I’m using for processing and editing DV.

How best to accomplish this?

2

What is your problem? Is something not working?

3

Make a separate subnet for the machines (bridge, IP adress, DHCP server, one or more ports, possibly a WiFI SSID)
and then setup firewall rules to allow that subnet to communicate only with the NAS.

4

Static setup and no gateway address on the machines.
Firewall drop those IPs in case anything does make it back out.

There will always be a risk of malicious stuff from any routed lan but chances of your main pc getting infected then pushing that to another lan computer? Slim.