Reworking the network
Posted by Pepijn Oomen
I have quite a mixture of machines in my home network. It consists of Windows 2000 workstations, a MacOSX workstation, a PlayStation 2, bluetooth enabled Palm m505 and Siemens mobile, and a Debian GNU/Linux server. This provides for an excellent testbed for experimenting with interoperability issues between all of these and is a perfect playground to experiment with the different network technologies in use in the business environment today.
In the following entries I'll try to describe the different components that make up the network and how I made all of those work together seamlessly, with a minimum of administrative overhead. I'll try to mention all the key-points learned while going through this.
The firewall is connected to the outside world through an ADSL modem, configured to operate in bridged mode (it came out-of-the-box as a NAT router) so that the outside interface of the firewall is directly connected to The Net. This demands a properly configured firewall but makes the setup more flexible and the network topology less complicated.
The basis of the internal network is a simple ethernet bus. The main protocol on this bus is the IP protocol, since that is common ground for all of todays operating systems. It is important to realize that any internal network should use address-spaces from RFC1918 to prevent collisions with 'real-world' servers. Since my home network is connected through a VPN to the network at the office, I also need to make sure that the IP address-spaces at both locations do not collide.
