Stuart Bird wrote: > I am in the process of setting up a general purpose (file,web,mail,ftp > etc) server using the latest testing version of Mepis SoHo. To save on > space I thought it would be a good idea to let the box act as a > router/firewall as well so that I can remove my Smoothwall box and > have everything in one.
It's worth mentioning that n principle a firewall is best on its own box; potentially any software weakness can make your firewall ineffective, and on a dedicated firewall like Smoothwall (I prefer IPCop) there is less to go wrong and what is there is usually better audited. That said, if you're going through a router anyway I personally wouldn't worry about it. > The first problem I came across is that I have a dynamic IP assigned > by my isp. I have a dyndns account and under the old setup could > handle this from within Smoothwall as there was a module for it, but > now I have no way to track the domain name against the dynamic IP. I > have read that a utility called "ddclient" can be installed to do this > and just wondered if anyone has any experience of this program before > I install it. I'm just looking for any tips or pitfalls or even > suggestions for better apps to use. I'm sure I've used ddclient in the past with no trouble. Note that Smoothwall simply provides a frontend to one of the DynDNS clients - it may even be ddclient, and if not you could choose to use whatever Smoothwall uses. > I have the DHCP server working on the server, and all machines within > the lan are being assigned IP's in the correct range (192.168.79.*) > however I cannot access the internet on any of them including the > server itself. I can ping the router (currently 192.168.1.1) and I can > ping all machines on the lan in all directions (ie server to client, > client to server etc). But still no internet. This is a little confusing. If your LAN PCs can ping 192.168.1.1 then either routing is working or they're connected on the wrong side of your "firewall". You should have a cable from one ethernet port to the router, and from the other ethernet port to a hub/switch to which all other LAN PCs connect. And you should have the right IP addresses assigned to the right ethernet ports. Actually on re-reading I'm not sure you actually can ping the router from the PCs? Maybe its just from the server/firewall PC, in which case I've missed the point. As far as actually getting the routing to work I'm not sure what is involved and look forward to someone(else)'s answer! > DNS I am very unsure about. Do I need to run a DNS server for my lan? > If so, what sort of settings do I need to get it running. Do you need DNS for your own LAN hosts? If not, you don't need a DNS server and you can access them all from each other by IP address. If you want to play with (eg) virtual hosting and don't want to manage lots of hosts files then DNS makes sense. I haven't tried Mepis SoHo but I would have thought that installing DNS ought to be fairly straightforward; I would go with whatever package they provide. I'm certainly interested to hear how you get on; I like Mepis as a distro. Although I have to say that Ubuntu (and Ubuntu-Server) 6.06 is catching up with Mepis, which is all the more interesting when you realise that future Mepis releases will be based on Ubuntu. -- Mark Rogers More Solutions Ltd :: 0845 45 89 555 _______________________________________________ Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
