This blog is to capture some of the challenges in building a new home server. The server is to act as the DMZ and firewalls for the home network. I have a cable modem with a fixed IP (IP4) address that the new server plugs into. All my home computing equipment, computers, WIFI router, network printer etc plug into a network switch at the back.
The server acts as
- Firewall external and internal
- DNS server (it was to serve as authority for my domains but Vodafone seems to block UDP DNS queries from outside it’s network)
- Router
- LAMP stack (Apache2 plus MySQL plus PHP/Perl running on Linux)
- Email server (SMTP + POP3/IMAP)
Getting these set up is not so difficult but I decided to try using ISPConfig3 to manage them. ISPConfig This is a tool that makes it look like you are running an ISP and you can easily provision web sites, and email accounts. It has some functionality that I don’t need and some features don’t quite work as intended, but in general it makes it easier to manage everything for multiple users.
I also installed wordpress for this blog and for all the users. The ungrateful people aren’t rushing to create content.
So the hard disk developed a problem that stopped the server from booting, so I have rebuilt it (temporary solution). It is quite quick to do a second time, but the content migration is slow.