Home network

[legelf]

I'm very new to networking but I have the opportunity to get a hold of an old IBM pentium server. I would like to set this machine up as firewall/server for a small home network.

As stated before I'm as green as they come to the networking world. I need to find some links to basic networking principals and methods. I'm no stranger to computers as I have written programs and web pages. Any leads or information would be of great value to this newbie.

[Diz2k2]

Will this server be windows based or linux based? Here are a few networking links:



http://www.howstuffworks.com/home-network.htm

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/

[legelf]

Diz2k2:

I'm thinking Linux for the network which will have DSL(dhcp) hooked up to the server for internet. Also trying to figure out if I should be using a hub or a router.

P.S. Thanks for the links, anything I can get my hands on I'm reading.

[pcghost]

Just a few quick questions to help us help you

How many machines? running what OS's?
Do you want a proxy for web-sharing/caching?
Do you want a real firewall or let a router do it?
What Distro are you using on the server?

The whole network setup can be relativly easy if you have a good plan developed ahead of time.

But with a little more info, I will be happy to help you where I can. :)

[neondog]

You could run it as a NAT / Firewall box for your home LAN. You'll need 2 network cards (I hope the motherboard has 2 open PCI slots). One will connect to your DSL modem and the other will connect to a hub or preferably a switch, which will connect to your home LAN.

To setup the NAT you'll need to understand iptables, which requires the 2.4 Kernel. Look for a distro that is 'lite' enough for the system. I got a 166 Mhz box pulling NAT duty under RH 7.2 I had to drag it kicking and screaming through the install but it works. HINT: Use the text mode

Get the machine running with both NICs and ask more questions if needed.

Good luck!

[st0rmrd]

Just finished today with my home-networking scheme

You probably want to do the ip_masquerade thing and all

The guys told you most you need to start, just have patience, I tried a couple of things before I understood what I need.

And don't worry about not getting right, now that I made it work it's all clear where was my mistake

Anyhow, just get your one machine up with a distribution you trust, then connect your local network (use ping etc. to make sure every machine can "see" the rest), then connect to the internet with your primary machine and make sure everything working.

Now, the tricky part is to make your machine "ip_forward" the internal network, that is tell it to "take whatever calls you get from inside, make them look like the server is making the call, and when a reply comes, send it to the machine that asked for the info in the first place". That's a pretty straight-forward thing to set-up (a couple of options and should be working) and when that works, if you ping an outside site, say www.linuxnewbie.org, from your internal network(the one that doesn't connect straight to your DSL) you should get a normal ping reply.

BUT, if it doesn't work, keep going, set up your DNS server (I used BIND, didn't have to set up anything, just start it) and the squid (again, no set up, just started it, it defaults to accept connections at port 3128).

So far I didn't have any ping replys but the internal network could resolve (using DNS) names to IPs and Internet Explorer could use the proxy (squid) to connect on the internet.

Now, I use SuSE 7.3 Pro, so the tricky part was installing SuSEfirewall2, and making all the neccessary rules to make it route the traffic I wanted. If you get to that point I'd be glad to help, or the rest of the people in here (which probably know more on tweaking this stuff).

If you make it work, it'll feel great, so keep trying!

[jlany]

Take a peek here;
http://www.clarkconnect.org/info/requirements.html :)