Recommendation for home networking config

tiredoldcoder · n00b Joined: 29 Nov 2003 Posts: 44

What does your experience tell you as far as best choices when building a Linux home network gateway/server? Here are my needs:

Firewall
NAT addressing
DNS Caching Only Server (plus handle internal DNS)
File server for WIndows PC's
Web server (internal, light use only)

I am currently doing this with a RH 6.2 system (no laughing, please) which has been rock solid for over two years, but maintaining it has become too much work. I have been looing at Gentoo for a while and have a running Gentoo workstation. I like what I see and I want to replace my old gateway OS.

My gateway PC is a AMD K6 233MHz, 65MB RAM, 48GB HDD, with two enet cards. Today I use ipchains for the NAT & Firewall, Samba for file serving. and Apache for Web Server But I want to move toward SOCKS which more software like chat programs seems to be able to work with.

I'd like to do more things like LDAP so i have standard userid/password management.

Your thoughts?

v/r

TOC

ewan.paton · Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2003 7:30 am Post subject:

gentoo is massively configurable to the point you can pretty much make it do anything you want, but with machine like that unless you are going to setup cywin with distcc on your windows machines it will take ages to build much, granted as a server you dont need much. a grp install may help you out but be prepaired to wait, it takes almost a day to install the system on my duel p4 xeon rig.
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Regor · Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2003 11:43 am Post subject:

You'd be hard pressed to run Gentoo on a system with that little RAM since you do so much compiling. Even if you install with GRP, you'll still be compiling updates.

Otherwise you're okay. I'm running Gentoo on a K6/233 that's fulfilling essentially the same functions for me minus apache but with the addition of email service (postfix/imap), internal ntp server, Gentoo rsync mirror, dhcp server, usenet cache/server, and http caching proxy.

Initial install took a while on this box, but I did it from the already running system (Debian) so I had virtually no downtime.

Nevertheless, without more RAM, I'd stick to a binary distribution.
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fleed · l33t Joined: 28 Aug 2002 Posts: 756 Location: London

If you have other gentoos you can also compile binary packages tailored for your gw machine using the -B flag to emerge. Just make sure when you're building them that you set the same USE and compilation flags on the command line (using export) so that the bin packages will be suitable to the gw machine. That's what I do to install big packages (xfree, qt, etc) on my 233 laptop. Oh, I also use distcc to speed up other builds.

smart · Guru Joined: 19 Nov 2002 Posts: 455

You're probably perfetly allright with this box if it does firewall only, which is what i'd suggest. Firewall in my opinion should be nothing than firewall. All the other jobs you want done should be a second machine on the inside net.
BTW: add SQUID

Jesore · Posted: Wed Dec 10, 2003 1:01 pm Post subject:

Like the previous posts, I'd recommend a binary dist. Debian is quite appropriate for your task I think. You had an old RedHat so I assume you want the gateway to just run and not put too much effort in updating/maintaining, which is where debian is best at.
You might also have a look at firewall distros like smoothwall or clarkconnect (clark is redhat based and has all you need) - even less trouble setting up.

Jesore