[lug] Personal Server Behind DSL Router

[Daniel Webb]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 03:20:18PM -0800, karl horlen wrote:

> I want to setup a linux mail,web,dns server with
> iptables firewall behind my dsl router.  
> 
> It will not be heavily trafficked and is purely for
> personal use and half just for the fun of the project.
> 
> I was wondering if a server like this is possible if
> all of these services live on a box with a nonpublic
> ip address "behind" a router?

Yes, assuming your DSL router will forward all the ports (it probably will).
Several people on this list do this for fun (including me), it's definitely
possible although you may be underestimating the learning curve if you've
never played with running a server before.  Especially DNS, which strangely
can be as complicated as all the other services combined in my experience.

For the email side of things, you can run your own webmail with postfix for
SMTP, dovecot for IMAP, and IlohaMail/Apache for the webmail interface.  Of
course you can use lot of combinations of the above three, but after years of
fiddling with it I think those three are the best for a hobbyist.  If you do
that you'll want to firewall off the IMAP port at the DSL router since
IlohaMail and many other webmail apps want to use plain IMAP to talk to the
IMAP server, but you don't want plain IMAP being used on the big bad internet.
You can still leave IMAP-SSL open at the router to use a IMAP mail client
remotely through dovecot.