Ideas for networking project...
 

I've been tinkering around with my home network on and off for the past year now. I've always used an older PIII rig, usually just doing things like DHCP or file server, but I've also had Apache running on it for a while too.

Well, due to space constraints, my server is now a virtual machine in VMWare Server 1.08. Running CentOS 5.2, no problems with networking. I'm ready to go.

My problem is, I just don't know where to start. This network is purely for my education, so simplicity isn't priority. I'm trying to utilize as many technologies that a SMB network might be using. BTW, I'm running Linux on the Vserver, but Windows XP for the clients. I'm trying to figure out how I can use things like MySQL, Apache, Postfix, BIND, ProFTPd, OpenLDAP, etc. I can get DHCP3 running, and set up Samba/NFS, but I'm not sure how I could implement the other services while actually using them. Also, I've gotten in to hot water with my ISP (Comcast) once before for running my Apache server. I had no idea I was getting so much traffic on port 1234. Comcast won't allow HTTP, SMTP, or FTP servers on my residential connection, so I have to keep this all internal.

Any ideas or thoughts would be very appreciated. Thanks for reading.

-Andrew

One quick and easy project that will help your network as well would be setting up a caching DNS server. If you are running Centos you can run either BIND as a caching name server or look up dnsmasq as a very good alternative.

dnsmasq and ProFtpd
 

I agree; dnsmasq is a great little DNS server for a LAN. I am using it for our 3-machine LAN here at home.
It's easy to configure, and it *can* do DHCP too but I found that my roommates WInXP machine was too daft to get DHCP info from it, so I just use it for DNS.

For DHCP I use ISC's DHCP client/server which you can get from their website or from perhaps your Linux distros repository or whatever. I use that for the 3 LAN machines here too.

Proftpd we use here for transferring files between the three machines. We were getting fed up with copying stuff onto floppies, USB sticks, burning CD's etc when we wanted to put some stuff from one machine onto another. Now, one machine logs into Proftp using Gftp, and uploads stuff onto the ftp server; the other person logs into the ftp server again using Gftp, and downloads the stuff. Presto!

All the above, plus our masquerading firewall which allows us to share a dialup connection, is running on a recycled P-333 Intel machine that someone at work gave to me for nothing. I put two network cards into it and a modem, and it has been my "project/firewall/server/experiment/learning-tool..." machine for months now.

Have fun! And good luck with your networking experimenting-- it IS fun indeed :)

Sasha

Java, GrapefruitGirl, thanks for the replies.

Java, I like the idea about the caching DNS server. I hadn't thought of that.

Grapefruit, I've setup ISC's DHCP server before on a Debian server I had. It worked, but had a bit of trouble configuring it at the time. I had no idea what the numbers represented for time in it's configuration file. Say I put 70 for lease time. Is this 70 seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? I never did find my answer.

I like what you're doing with ProFTPd, but it sounds like it would be more easier to do with simple NFS/Samba filesharing. Personally, I'm not going for simple, so I'll probably take your approach with the FTP server.

I've been wanting to setup a firewall, but I'm not totally sure how I'd go about it with the way my network is setup. My dual-boot Windows/Debian box is running VMWare Server with a CentOS 5.2 virtual machine. My cable modem connects to my primary router. My primary router is connected to a secondary router acting as wireless bridge. 2 Windows XP clients connect via Wirless G, and my dual-boot box connects via Cat5e to the secondary router. Could I use my virtual machine as a firewall? I know it's easier to put the firewall in between the modem and the network, but that can't be done right now.

Thanks again for the helpful replies guys (and a gal), :).

I've been thinking about other things I could do. I know I want to set up filesharing between the network, and setting up an external drive for the VM for network backups with Zmanda. I want to setup a single-login so that when the users log onto their computers, they'll have access to the services of the network. Would OpenLDAP and Kerberos do this? I was also giving thought to Apache and MySQL. I don't do any web development, and I can't host a website, but I'm still looking for some way to include these services in a functional way. Still out on that one. I'd like to setup Nagios for network monitoring, IPtables for a firewall, Postfix for an email server, and anything else I should probably know in preparation for a job as a SysAdmin. I'm sure that installing and configuring network services isn't the whole of it, but it's a good start I figure.

Another good little project is to set up a Cacti server to monitor and graph traffic, disk, cpu etc. Cacti would be good place to start with monitoring as it's not too bad to set up and uses MySQL as a backend.

http://www.cacti.net/