Home Linux Server

shagrat · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 219 Location: Norway

I have a old Pentium Celeron 633 Box and wanted to set it up as some sort of server. I want to be able to share my new 3MB cable connection among my familys 4 Windows and 2 Linux machines. Printer sharing would also be great and the box would also have to function as a file server for both the Linux and Windows boxes. But I don't know where to start. What should I run? Samba? Please help me here, and if you have some links to actual home server "projects" that would also be great. Thanks in advance.

syko · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 9:28 am Post subject:

Unfortunately, I can't offer a whole lot of help, since I'm far from being a guru, but my setup is this:

2 Windows desktops, 1 Linux desktop and a Linux gateway/router.

For the internet sharing I just use NAT/IP Masquerading (I followed this pretty closely, although it is a bit outdated, and you'd have to adjust for a gentoo install (do you want to use gentoo?)) and an iptables firewall script. The iptables website is a good place to start researching a firewall/router type of setup - specifically the Documentation section with things like "What is iptables?"

For file sharing I use a pretty basic Samba file/print sharing network. I don't recall where I learned about Samba at the moment.

If you haven't already, it might be worth it to do a quick search of the forums for things like NAT, IP Masq, iptables, or Samba. I'm not sure exactly what you'll get, but it might be a good jumping off point.

Like I said, sorry I couldn't be much more help, but I am extremely tired, I set up my little router box quite some time ago, and a lot of the documentation I used I found with google, and so I've since lost it. HTH

shagrat · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 219 Location: Norway

Thanks, reading some of it now.

smiler.se · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 9:57 am Post subject:

Yeap iptables and samba is the way to go

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shagrat · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 219 Location: Norway

Read up a bit about IP Masquerading and it's seems that some applications don't work behind this setup. What are your experience with this? Will my brother for example be able to angage in an online game while my other brother is chatting on irc? And what about p2p sharing and downloading?

zhenlin · Veteran Joined: 09 Nov 2002 Posts: 1361

For TCP, install a SOCKS proxy. For UDP, use forced-routing.

robostac · n00b Joined: 26 Aug 2003 Posts: 34

Most things work behind MASQ. Theres no way you'll really be able to share (unless your isp gives you multiple ip's) without doing MASQ. Most online games will work, and all can be made to work with a bit of fiddling. Hosting Servers won't generally work, unless you do it on the gateway. Peer2Peer will work, in passive mode. IRC works fine (No dcc without fiddling).

shagrat · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 219 Location: Norway

ClausH · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 11:29 am Post subject: Re: masq

masseya · Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 4:42 pm Post subject:

Moving from Off The Wall.
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wishkah · Guru Joined: 09 May 2003 Posts: 441 Location: de

About that static ip-stuff: It's prolly not worth it. You might wanna give www.dyndns.org a shot. You get a free hostname, all you gotta do is update it whenever your ip changes (e.g. somewhere.dyndns.org) from your server. Check out their homepage, there are plenty of (linux) tools for this purpose.

I wrote a little script that does the updating only if the ip really changed (that's critical, update 3-4 times without necessity and you'll get banned). This one uses ez-ipupdate, which is one of the said update-tools. Just put the script into crontab:

syko · Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 1:33 am Post subject:

taskara · Posted: Fri Aug 29, 2003 2:00 am Post subject:

if u don't wanna install gentoo, something like clark connect will do what u are looking for and more..
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stonent · Veteran Joined: 07 Aug 2003 Posts: 1139 Location: Texas

I really like clark connect as a server distro. I run it as a firewall on my home network. All versions are based off of Redhat releases so you could install apt-rpm or use Redhat's up2date utility. Plus it has a nice web based admin tool similar to many Internet Appliances for firewall, mail, port forwarding, proxy, snort, snortsnarf, samba, ftp... etc..
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shagrat · Apprentice Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 219 Location: Norway

endu · n00b Joined: 03 Jul 2003 Posts: 18 Location: CH

for IRC DCC sends, FTP active modes and some other stuff behind NAT, read about connection tracking with iptables. most games are designed to work behind NAT, so this should be no problem.

Sieg · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2002 Posts: 87

I have a setup behind a firewall/gateway that works fine. The router/fw is an Astaro box (great if you have one system to dedicate as a router and firewall), and 2 linux servers, 1 windows server and 2 windows workstations behind it. All hosting works great, the only difference is that you have to do explicit port nat on all services that are hosted behind the firewall/router. In your case, it would be the same for services behind, but you would not need to for the services that you would run from within your router/firewall. As far as P2P, IRC (with DCC), etc goes, sometimes you'll have to, once again, do explicit port nat translations in your gateway. This means that this service will be restricted to that particular system in your network. It can be a pain, but works for me. As far as gaming goes, unless you want to host a server, you should never have a problem connecting to outside games from within your network. There is not one game for which I had to do that so far. The only gaming related software that did need that is voice communication, like battlecom, roger wilco or teamspeak.