Now that school is officially off till Spring, I have been doing a lot of work on my “test-bed” server at home. I pretty much try to replicate a small business environment. I use this server to gain experience configuring and administrating services. Currently, it runs:

• Web sever (Apache and PHP) - I run Wordpress (this blog and IAmBelmin blog), MediaWiki for wiki.bfworks.com and a couple of other PHP based sites.
• Database server (MySQL) - Using MySQL for the database back-end of the sites hosted on the box.
• Firewall/Router (IPTables) - Wrote up some custom IPTables rules to secure and route my network. Currently have two subnets–wired and wireless.
• DHCP server (DHCPd) - Configured to give IPs to computers connecting to the network based on the subnet they are on.
• Nameserver (BIND) - Through DHCPd updates A and PTR record for new clients on the server under the internal domain iambelmin.lan.
• Filesharing (Samba) - Made a couple of shares, private and public, for my internal network
• Other Linux services (SSH, NTP, etc.) - Services of typical Linux installations.

While school is off, I plan to write up a few Wiki articles concerning some of my configurations and administration practices. This is mostly for my own benefit since having things documented will help me better understand why I did things a certain way later in the future. As of now, I have most of my configuration files pretty heavily documented so this should not be a difficult task.

A few years ago I had an old computer lying around and decided to experiment by putting Linux on it to create a gateway which will host some servers, have DHCP and firewall capabilities.

I decided to write a q+d. how-to for my presentation in my CSCI 345 course (Computer Architecture III). I have since moved this article to the BFWorks wiki.

I will be presenting tomorrow so we will see how it goes.