Nowadays, with cheap broadband connections more and more people are hosting their own server, just for the fun of it. Which is what I’m doing and just as a hobby. If you are considering setting up one yourself, there are some remarks to point out.

The first is that you should from the beginning consider two boxes, one for the server and one for the firewall. That means you can setup your firewall first, make it as restrictive as possible and then playing around with your server. Use port forwarding to only the ports (services) your really want to expose to the public. That way your server can provide both public and private services – if you like.

FireWall

I know about two firewall Linux distributions. Over time I have used both.

• SmoothWall – which is my current favorite. It is slightly better than the next.
  
• IPCop – which is a pure open source project. Originally an offspring from SmothWall.

They both work the same, you convert a PC to a complete stand-alone firewall. At the minimum you need two network cards. However, I do recommend plugging in three network cards, which means you can setup you own DMZ and keep you server there in the fridge.

You can use an old PC, yes very old. My first SmoothWall2 installation run at a desktop PC with 200MHz CPU, 64MB RAM and 2GB disk. The second installation, was IPCop, running at a 233MHz CPU, 96MB RAM, 4GB disk Toshiba Satelite laptop. It were operable for several years, until one of the two network PCCARDs burnt. I couldn’t find a new one with a dongle. All PCCARDs nowadays comes with a bulb, wich prevents one stacking two on top of each other. My current SmoothWall3 installation, runs on the cheapest PC I could buy at that time. It has three gigabit network cards, so I can run my server in a separate DMZ.

Server

My server is runningUbuntu server edition on a box I assembled myself, just for the fun of it. Another post, some other day, will describe the server.

• Ubuntu Server

NAS

Sooner or later, you will end up with a requirement for large storage and/or backup. If you have a spare box, which do not be fancy, try setting up a NAS. It’s very easy. Besides of the box, you need at least one disk for storage. I do recommend two or three disks and setting up RAID. I have been using

• FreeNAS - for a year now and is very pleased with it.

It is based on BSD and not Linux, but that does not matter. You control it via a web interface anyway. If you want to try it first before investing in disk, you can install it to a virtual box, like VMware, VirtualBox etc. Try first a plain vanilla installation. After you know how it is working, rip it out and create a new VM with three disks and install FreeNAS with RAID5. RAID5 requires three equally sized empty disks. In practice, you will need a very, very small fourth disk for the OS, although you can run FreeNAS from a USB stick or a CD/Floppy combo.

I grabbed an old spare box, bought three new cheap 500GB disks and installed FReeNAS with RAID5 without any hazzles at all. It provides several services, like SAMBA for the Windows machines belonging to the rest of the family and RSYNC for server backup.