Debuntu

Linux is a perfect platform to act as a router/gateway.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to set up a Linux box to operate as a network router. The box will provide the following services:

• DHCP server to provide the ip addresses to the machines in the LAN
• DNS server to resolve domain names
• Gateway with IP tables to give access to the Internet.
• Firewall with IP tables.

The resulting machine will have quite a small footprint: about 600M, and except if your network is intensively used, a low spec computer can be recycled to do the job.

As the machine is going to operate as a router/firewall

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1. DNS server

As a DNS server we are going to use bind9, it will be configured to resolve the names of the host for our network lan.debuntu.local.

The DNS server will also accept dynamic DNS update from the local DHCP server.

In this tutorial, I will be using the Dynamic DNS feature of bind.

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2. DHCP server

In order to provide an IP address to the other machines in the network, we need to use a DHCP server.
This DHCP server will provide the host with all the information needed to connect to any other accessible host. i.e, the IP, netmask, gateway, domain name server.
The DHCP server will also update bind with a nt set of hostname and IP when the client is requesting a specific hostname.

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3. Forwarding Internet traffic with IPtables

IPtables is both used to act as a firewall, but it is also the one passing packets from one network to another.

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