Small linux server for home network.

CiniO

I came up with idea to make a small server for home purposes at my house.
I have a eircom broadband (ADSL) which is was operated by Zyxel P-660HW-T1 router provided by eircom. It consists of router, ethernet switch, and Wifi accesspoint. All was in use. Additionally I have old router Linksys WRP400 which I used some time ago as a router for my network, but couldn't use it with Eircom (it has ethernet WAN port). At the moment it was connected only as as VOIP gateway.
Under all above there's 5 PC's, one plugged through ethernet, and 4 through wifi.

My idea was to use an old PC (Intel celeron 466mhz, 128mb ram, 160gb hdd, 2x ethernet) as the server for home purposes.
For this I installed slackware linux 13.1. I was trying to assign public IP address to the server. One way to do it, was through eircom Zyxel router's option IP Passthrough.
It just mirrored it's WAN ip address to the linux server. Unfortunately I couldn't make that setup working, as linux server was missing default gateway, and didn't want to work even if I def gw manually as it was in different subnet.
I was thinking to assign a local address to server (like 192.168.1.2) and forward all ports from eircom router.
But eventually I came up with idea, to use PPPoE passthrough option on eircom router.
I had to confugure PPPoE (PPP over Ethernet) on my linux server, and used one of ethernet adaptors to connect to eircom router. On this setup PPP connnection is encapsulated over ethernet protocol. I had to configure then my linux server to establish PPP connection directly with eircom.
To my surprice, it got public IP address, while at the same time eircom Zyxel router had different public IP address. That put me in position, to have 2 different IP addresses at the same time on 2 different devices, and both working. I was surprices it works like that, but it does.

Next thing was to configure NAT on linux server, and connect all home PC's to it.
I would need ethernet switch, and wifi accesspoint. But I though, that I can easily use my linksys WRP400 router instead of those 2 devices.
Unfortunately it wasn't that easy as I thought.
You can't configure this device to work as a switch and accesspoint.
It has to be a router, and has to be connected through it's WAN port to my linux server, to make VOIP gateway work (and this is a must). So I made local subnet 192.168.10.0/30 to connect linux server and linksys router
Then on linksys I configured local network as 192.168.15.0/27.

I didn't want that, because then I couldn't use DHCP server from my linux server, as linksys doesn't support DHCP relay. I wanted to use all services directly from the server. But in this case DHCP for local home network has to go from linksys device. Unless anyone of you has any idea how to fix that?

Besides I had to set a route on my linux server to network 192·168.15.0/27 thorough gateway 192.168.10.2 (which is linksys router).
And that way NAT on linux server serves local network 192.168.15.0/27 plugged in directly to linksys, even though it's not plugged in directly to my linux server. Obviously NAT on linksys router is turned off.

I pretty much made all above working - almost like I wanted, except from this DHCP.

What do you advice to do now?

I want to do all this for practice, to learn how to do it....

I'm planning to do file server and printer server on my linux server, for sharing files and printer over my local network. That can be done easily with Samba I suppose.
I was thinking about FTP server, Apache server with some SQL (mysql or maybe postgresql - I don't know which is better).
What else can I do on my server which could be useful, but most importantly I would learn something from doing it.

Thanks on any feedback, as I'm person who used to be very interested in computer stuff, but for last few years dropped it at all. I just want to come back to it.

Testament

So whats a server?

A server is a computer (or software package) in a network that is used to provide particular services to other computers ( if im not wrong )

What would u like to do with this server now?

jpl888

TBH the sky is the limit as far as Linux is concerned. There is almost always a way of doing what you want.

I have been setting up servers for 15 years, the useful services my customers have are:-

DNS
DHCP
File and Print
Firewall - Static NAT, Masquerading, DNAT, Ingress and Egress filtering
Email - POP3, IMAP, SPAM filtering and SMTP (SMTP with authentication + TLS for secure transmission)
Internet - Proxying and malware scanning (only works with non-encrypted traffic)
VPN - IPSEC and SSL
Virtualising Windows
Web hosting
IDS
Usage Reporting
Traffic capture and analysis

I would use Ubuntu instead as it's easier, but you will definitely learn more about how things work using the likes of Slackware, Gentoo or the ultimate LFS (Linux From Scratch).

As the previous poster said it's really a question of finding out what you want it to do and then finding out how to do it. There are also a multitude of ways to achieve the same thing, the way I choose is by find the way that has the best documentation.