[SATLUG] Home network

[Jeremy Mann]

On Wed, Apr 2, 2008 at 7:43 AM, Justin Burdette
<justin.burdette at gmail.com> wrote:
> I finally decided it was time to upgrade my home network. I'm adding in
>  wifi, and I'm also buying a couple of small form factor Dell units (P3) to
>  run as firewall, web server, DHCP, etc...
>
>  I'm trying to figure out what distro would be the best for these
>  applications. What I'd prefer is something that I can log into from my main
>  PC (using OpenSUSE 10.3, probably through rdesktop or something like it) as
>  these machines won't have a monitor/keyboard/mouse attached. I'd like to be
>  able to run a basic GUI...no need for GNOME or KDE, but will probably go
>  with Fluxbox.

Its about time for another flame war ;) No seriously, you'll get all
kinds of responses as to what distro to run. All of them are equally
good. Personally, I run Slack 12 on my home server for years. Its what
I call Linux in one of the pure forms. I also tried Gentoo for awhile
but the box was always compiling something to keep up to date. Ubuntu
is good, but I've never run in server form, so I can't comment on
that. Here at work we run three clusters with 113 CPUs on CentOS 4.3.

>  My next question, which I shouldn't even have to ask, but I haven't done
>  mixed networks in so long that I've forgotten how. What I would like to do
>  is run all of my wired units with static IP addresses and have DHCP assign
>  addresses for wifi connections and wired machines that I'm working on for
>  customers. The Linksys I have doesn't seem to like static IPs when its DHCP
>  is enabled...it was set to assign in the 192.168.1.100-150 range and I
>  couldn't do anything with my static IP of 192.168.1.50. Is there an easy way
>  to set this up on a Linux DHCP server?

If you're using the Linksys just for wireless, then I would disable
everything I could on it and let your server serve out DHCP requests.
Its not hard, if Geoff's around he did the same. I think what he did
was to not use the WAN input, but connect one of the Linksys switch
ports to his existing switch.

>  Last question...I presume the firewall box should do strictly that, no DHCP,
>  Apache, FTP server, etc...correct? A P3 system with enough RAM and swap
>  should be able to handle the other services, yes?

Depends on what you want your electric bill to be ;) I'm in favor of
an all in one server. I have a P3 666mhz with 512MB and it runs
Apache, DHCP, XBMC, MySQL, Samba and World Community Grid. I have
never had to reboot it and it runs very well.


-- 
Jeremy Mann
jeremy at biochem.uthscsa.edu

University of Texas Health Science Center
Bioinformatics Core Facility
http://www.bioinformatics.uthscsa.edu
Phone: (210) 567-2672