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Home Server Assistance?

I'm waiting for the switch from cox residential to cox business and I have a couple of questions. First, I'm connecting a Linux box to the Internet and then connecting my Windows PC to it.

1) I know I have to have two network cards on the Linux box. Is a crossover cable sufficient?

2) I have WinGate. Would that work for accessing the Linux box? Or is there a better solution?

3) Is Samba on the Linux box necessary? I don't want to share files or the printer. I figure I can FTP the stuff over to the Linux box (at my last company it was the only way to do it on certain Unix servers).

4) Apache as a webserver is fine. What do the distros include regarding mail servers and FTP servers? I'm going to use Red Hat 7.3 -- is Qmail part of that?

Okay, more than a couple of questions...

TIA,
Richard

1) If you will just have one machine connected to the linux box then a crossover cable should be enough.

2) Don't know what WinGate is. But you can either setup telnet or ssh (ssh would probably be better) to access your linux box. Putty is a good client which you can use for that.

3) Samba isn't necessary.

4) It depends for each distribution what they include. Usually they include several different ones so you still get to choose. In my opinion proftpd would be a good choice for a ftp server.

WinGate (http://wingate.deerfield.com) allows file access to other machines on a network. It's a Windows program.

Proftpd is the one I've heard of. Is it in the distro or do I have to install that separately?

I've considered a KVM in order to view the Linux box w/o having to use another keyboard and monitor (or switching cables all the time). Is there something like VNC for Linux, that would make it so I wouldn't need the KVM?

I've used Putty for Windows. Pretty easy. I'll have to take a look at that again.

The url gives a 404. But if you want to have direct fileaccess then you will need to install samba on the linux machine. But ftp file access might be enough for you.

VNC is also available for linux. It's a very nice solution and shouldn't be hard to get running at all.
If the linux machine is just going to be running as a server then you wouldn't need to run any gui though. And then having telnet or ssh access through putty would be more then enough.

Re: Home Server Assistance?

Quote:

Originally posted by Wanderer
I'm waiting for the switch from cox residential to cox business and I have a couple of questions. First, I'm connecting a Linux box to the Internet and then connecting my Windows PC to it.

1) I know I have to have two network cards on the Linux box. Is a crossover cable sufficient?

2) I have WinGate. Would that work for accessing the Linux box? Or is there a better solution?

3) Is Samba on the Linux box necessary? I don't want to share files or the printer. I figure I can FTP the stuff over to the Linux box (at my last company it was the only way to do it on certain Unix servers).

4) Apache as a webserver is fine. What do the distros include regarding mail servers and FTP servers? I'm going to use Red Hat 7.3 -- is Qmail part of that?

Okay, more than a couple of questions...

TIA,
Richard

Hi!

1. Yea, as another poster said, for only one other PC, crossover should be enough.

2. If you want your setup to look like fig 1, then wingate would not be neccesary

Code:

Fig 1



______________

|                      |                ________                                ______

|  INTERNET      |-----ETH0= | LINUX  |=ETH1---(crossover)--|WIN| 

|_____________|                |_______|                                |____|

If, on the other hand you want your setup to look like fig 2, then you'd need wingate, and you'dd have to set up linux to use DHCP.

Code:

___________

|                  |        _____________                        __________

|  INTERNET  |------| Win w/ wgate  |---(crossover)--|  LINUX    |

|__________|        |_____________|                      |_________|

If you want to use the setup in fig 1, then you won't need any additional software for windows, just set it up to get an IP from the the linux box via DHCP, or set a static IP and tell the win box to use linux as the default gateway.

You'dd also need to set up IPtables on the linux box.

3. If you don't want to share printers or anything, then samba would not be neccesary. FTP would do just fine for file transfers.

4. I don't know what software comes with RH. :)

Good Luck!!
RefriedBean

PS, I know my ASCII art sucks
:rolleyes:

Okay, I'm using the figure 1 setup. What do I need to tell Windows to access the Internet from the PC via Linux? Do I need to install the DSN server on the Linux box?

Oops...make that DNS

You need to tell windows that the nix's internal ip is the default route and that's it.

You will also need to write iptables/ipchains rules to masquerade the internal network out to the internet.

hi,

i dont know if this would apply to you but i use a linux distro taken from debain ( i think ) its called LEAF or some call it LRP ( i cannot remember what it stands for ) but its basic function is to act as a router and can do many more things for example a web server, a mail server, dns server, or i use one for processing SETI data

if you want a look at http://leaf.sourceforge.net

once you have every thing set up change your settings in windows to: gateway = ip address of the linux box and add the ip address in to the dns settings as well

hope this helps
antken
p.s. dont forget to click the add button when you type the ip address in for the gateway otherwise windoze will forget it!