Linux home data center challenge :-)

[Tom Horsley]

I was just speculating how hard it would be to turn my Fedora
box (which is up all the time) into the central system all
my other computers go to for information (smtp, dns, imap, dhcp,
etc).

The more I investigate, the more impenetrably obscure admin
tasks I find I'd have to become an expert at. The biggest
obstacle being that most administration howtos are written
assuming I've got a block of static IPs and am running a "real" data
center, whereas I'd want to fake all that by having sendmail
or postfix or someone talk to my ISP as though it were simply
any other mail client, and having a DNS server obtain its
info by doing client style DNS lookups, not zone transfers
and other obscure gibberish I don't understand and my ISP
probably blocks anyway.

Are there any guides to doing stuff like this anywhere? Are
there even any lists of which obscure tools I'd have
to become expert at (I doubt I have a complete list.
Would I be likely to die of old age before I actually
got a "home ISP" working seamlessly? :-).