Geeking At School

These instructions, which will come in several posts, are from start to finish to set up a simple router that serves out DHCP addresses on the internal network card. I spent a lot of time getting this figured out, as I am not an expert at networking (yet--I will begin working on my CCNA after I finish studying for my A+). If you already have a working installation of Ubuntu Server you may skip this post if you'd like. As some background on exactly what I'm trying to accomplish here: I built this for work, so your setup may vary. Our setup includes many school sites that are physically separated from each other, but are connected via 100Mb fiber from a service provider back to our Technology Office, which has a Cisco 1841 that already contains all the routes setup to the site routers, which all are setup to serve out DHCP on their own subnet. The reason I was looking into this is to have a cheap, but reliable, replacement for our 15-year-old Compaq servers running Netware 6.5 th...

These instructions are from start to finish to set up a simple router that serves out DHCP addresses on the internal network card. I spent a lot of time getting this figured out, as I am not an expert at networking (yet--I will begin working on my CCNA after I finish studying for my A+). If you already have a working installation of Ubuntu Server you may skip the first section if you'd like. As some background on exactly what I'm trying to accomplish here: I built this for work, so your setup may vary. Our setup includes many school sites that are physically separated from each other, but are connected via 100Mb fiber from a service provider back to our Technology Office, which has a Cisco 1841 that already contains all the routes setup to the site routers, which all are setup to serve out DHCP on their own subnet. The reason I was looking into this is to have a cheap, but reliable, replacement for our 15-year-old Compaq servers running Netware 6.5 that are acting as routers. B...

Just got the green light to implement an OSX server (Xserve running 10.5 Leopard) as a gateway at one of our school sites to replace one of our ancient Novell servers that was choking down our bandwidth (the replacement of the server confirmed that). I have only good things to say about OSX server software--incredibly easy to setup. For those of you who have not setup an OSX server as a gateway, here's some tips that I got from Apple's documentation: The NAT service needs to be on (obviously) but in our environment, it was important that we choose the option to forward all IP addresses so that we could see traffic from individual computers, since all sites are on different subnets, but connect back to our office (through Charter provided connection) for internet, filtering, etc. In order for NAT to work properly, the firewall has to be on for the "packet divert rule" to be enabled, which is vital to NAT's functioning. This was my first mistake before reading A...