[Wylug-help] Help needed setting up server and LAN

[Mike Goodman]

Hi, Folks,

I'd like to set up a server on a box which includes two (identical) hdds 
and two 10/100 ethernet cards. I'd like it to be a web server, NFS 
server and print server and act as a firewall to the outside world, 
running on Debian 4 (Etch). I'd like this server, not my router, to 
offer DHCP and fixed addresses as appropriate to anything else on the 
network.  My router is a Netgear DG834 which hogs 192.168.0.1, so from 
my understanding, having anything behind the server in the 192.168.0.* 
range is a bad idea. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I have a fixed IP 
address from my ISP (Zen Internet).

I've done stacks of reading on the web but not found a tutorial which 
doesn't simply head me into trouble. The Debian Tutorial section skips 
over the whole question with "install the basic setup without adding any 
packages" and doesn't mention the topic once throughout the remainder. 
So, starting from scratch (again):

Using a single CD and netinstall, the system picks up both ethernet 
cards and sets the primary (eth0) using DHCP as something like 
192.168.0.6 which makes me wonder, is the "primary" the outward-facing, 
i.e. the one with the cat5/RJ45 attached to the router as I suspect, or 
is it the one attached to my 8-port hub, which also has another PC 
(running Ubuntu) and sometimes my laptop (running Xubuntu) attached by 
cat5s? I hit problems whenever I try to manually set the network on this 
card with either an alternative IP range, say 192.168.xx.0/255 or with 
the fixed (ISP-provided) IP address. Given the aspiration, should I 
simply accept the detected/allocated settings? Or should I accept them 
for the installation process then go back in and alter them manually? Or 
am I simply doing something wrong when configuring manually?

Once I have the answer to this, how do I configure eth1?

Last question for this stage: should I download any packages for the 
firewall part, or will the box itself act as a hardware firewall without 
any help?

Once I've got this far, I think I should be OK with the tutorials on 
offer for the server itself and for the NFS and print server parts, too.

One useful thing I did find out: the installation picks up both hdds. 
Once told to partition all of hd0, it automatically partitions hd1 as 
RAID. Cool. ;-)

TIA,

Mike