Linux home data center challenge :-)

[Tim]

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 19:40 -0400, Tom Horsley wrote:
> 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).

I do this.  It wasn't hard, though I didn't tackle it all at once.

I started playing with configuring sendmail, so it was the SMTP mail
server for my LAN.  I found that it was best to send all the mail out
through the ISP's SMTP server, because of the anti-spam techniques
commonly used by the rest of the world.  I found that it was a good idea
to run my own DNS server so that my LAN was easy to manage.

So next I learnt how to configure the DNS server.  I'm running my LAN
with private addresses and NAT on the gateway.  That helps somewhat in
not having to be providing correct answers to the public, as well as
with less chance for public exploitation.  Starting off with the
pre-configured caching-nameserver for BIND is pretty easy, then just
adding a few local records to a new zone, was all that was needed.

Then I figured I might as well get a DHCP server up and running so that
any more machines connecting to the LAN could be automatically
configured, well as much as possible (although you can specify SMTP
servers, and whatnot, in the details, I've yet to see a client that pays
attention to all of the useful information that you can provide).  Then
I worked at integrating the DNS and DHCP servers together.  Not too hard
once I realised some errors in the documentation (it said I could just
allow the updates by IP, but I no-longer could since several versions
past, I had to use keyfiles).

Next up I decided I wanted to be able to check my mail from any terminal
on the LAN.  For a while I just ssh'd into my usual box and ran the
e-mail client through it.  It solves the problem of having to configure
several clients, but the box mightn't always be running.  So I got IMAP
up and running (using Dovecot).  That wasn't too hard on FC4, but I've
not succeeded at doing the same on FC5.  Not sure why, I haven't spent a
lot of time om it, so my server is still running FC4, so are most of the
clients, and only a few are running FC5 (thus far, I'm not convinced FC5
is an "improvement", merely "different").

Much of this started out from one of those two-inch thick Linux books
you see in some of the bookstores.  It gave me information I could read
anywhere, and had some extra cross referencing that I needed.  i.e. What
man file file did I want to read, and which ones were related.

I'd start off by learning how to do one service at a time.  It's less
stressful.  I've seen some all-in-one turn-key systems, but you really
did need to know how to configure servers properly, so that you could
unconfigure the faults and stupid defaults out of them.

-- 
(Currently running FC4, but testing FC5, if that's important.)

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.
I read messages from the public lists.