Guillotined.

Last week, I removed my craptastic 17″ CRT monitor from my old desktop (actually I moved the whole thing into another room as well). So I now have a home server again.

Nothing fancy though. Its just running Debian stable with Samba for filesharing with the windows computers, openssh and irssi in a screen session.  Its also NAT-forwarding to an old Linksys wireless router so that I can have a decent wireless connection in my room (our regular wireless network downstairs seems to be out of reach).

First thing on the to-do-list is setting up a decent firewall script with IPTABLES. This looks pretty complicated at first, but once you get the hang of all the different chains and rules, it’s all very logical.  The only thing that really makes it complicated is my silly network layout (with the two routers). So it’ll still require some tinkering.

Linux Server: Choosing the distribution.

For starters, I want to point out that you can run a pretty decent linux home server on just about any distribution, excluding the likes of DSL and Puppy maybe. Some may require a little more tinkering than others, but in essence it’s quite feasable with any decent linux distro. This means I could just pick my favorite desktop distro, Arch Linux, and go on from there.

The thing is, I want to do it thoroughly. And at the same time, maybe learn a thing or two from a type of distribution that I’ve never used before.

Also, and for the record; This is not a guide on which distro you should use for a server.
I only describe here, what I find important and what lead me to my choice.
I don’t make a habit of telling other people what to do.