Arch Linux

reguila

Member

Registered: 2007-09-18

Posts: 3

Network setup advice

Hi there,

My home network will consist of a Belkin wireless router, an Athlon XP Desktop, and two Laptops (Wireless Access).
My Athlon XP is going to be an always on machine, that i wanted to setup with arch as an firewall/gateway, i may consider setup an openvpn to secure my wireless network and i also need this machine as a "support" workstation (this means i'll have to install X, i use it mainly for some quick browsing or office task whenever i don't want to turn on the laptop... yeah call me lazy!!), my printer will also be atached to this computer so i can say it will also be a print server .
I have a cable modem connection, so i was thinking of the following setup: The Cable modem connects to the Athlon XP trough eth0, providing internet connection (gateway) trough eth1. The Belkin router will connect to the eth1 adapter. (i consider disabling the built in router function in it using it as an access point only.
At this point you might be asking why i could ever wanted to connect things this way... why not connecting the Cable modem to the Belkin router and then to the desktop... , well the reason is simple, i use torrents a lot and my router seems to crash quite too often when handling torrents (maybe under excessive traffic or too many connections).
After this long and boring text , i would like to hear from you about possible security issues, advices, and other setup alternatives.

Final Note: I'm new to Arch, used to be a gentoo user and i'm quite happy for how things are handled here, although i think some improvements must be done in the wiki and documentation, i'll look forward to help contribute in some way. Keep up the good work and many thanks in advance.

hungsonbk

Member

Registered: 2007-05-26

Posts: 105

Website

Re: Network setup advice

Hi mate,
my network is similar to what you want to build. My Arch server/firewall is facing the internet with one ADSL connection, behind it is a Switch, not Wireless:D:D:D, cause i don't like wireless network. I also have an OpenVPN server i can connect my laptop when i am away. I also have sshd as a backdoor. You can setup OpenVPN by follow my post here:
http://bbs.unin83.com/viewtopic.php?t=157

My advise for you is make your Arch up and running, and then setup iptables to do NAT, and open some ports for OpenVPN and others. You can write your own iptables script and can find it with google. I believe that there are many scripts like this available.

Remember to enable ip forwarding at the Arch Linux.
If you setup SSH, the better idea is to open a different port rather than port 22 because when i use port 22, a lot of newbies and bots try to brute force the password-->big log files.

:D:D
You can also disable your Root account and use sudo instead for security.
After you have your server up and running, using nmap, hping, nessus, and other tools to check your server.

Hope this can help you.

Cheers.