Ok, so lets just start by saying I don't want somebody to spend a chunk of time writing a full how to on this before I even know if I want to do it.

My plan here is to put my new server in front of my network instead of on it. So than it would run a DHCP server for the rest of the computers and the wireless router. My domain name will be pointed to the IP address of my server obviously and thus the apache server and everything will be on there. What I want to be able to do is tunel through to my other computers an the network directly, instead of opening up a connection to my server, than a connection to my desktop.

So what would it take to have something like argento.opendissent.com point me to my desktop wile www.opendissent.com still goes to my server. Do I need to be running my own DNS server for that? What do I need roughly and how big of a project is this? I know we do it at the U, every lab computer has its own name and you just go to homer.itlabs.umn.edu to log into that computer, but I don't know how you do that.

Just a simple answer will do.

Well to my understanding to have something like argento.opendissent.com and www.opendissent.com you would need to setup dhcp and dns but this would only be useful for a local network because for someone to get to your computer outside of your network your isp would have to register your box as a true dns server which is highly doubtful.

or you could use a service like dyndns.org which provides dns capabilities so that you can have a custom domain name that will point to your main box in which there you could setup some iptables scripts to redirect ssh,http access to go to certain machines on your network.

Hope this helps kind of jumbled together but to have true dns you would probably need to be an isp or know of a way to get your dns servers registerd with icann etc..

I use a Linux Machine as my firewall / web / mail server.

It has 2 NICs ... one connected to my Cable Modem ... once conected to my internal network (a 24 port hub).

I use a firewall script to do IPMASQ ... the external network gets a DHCP address via my ISP ... the internal card is set to 192.168.0.1.

I use the firewall script here ... slightly modified.

I run a DHCP server on the internal interface (on the 192.168.0.0 network), a caching DNS server, LAMP web server, Mail Server (Postfix-MailScanner-ClamAV-SpamAssassin) on this machine.

I use zoneedit.com's dynamic DNS service and this script to keep the info updated at zoneedit for hughesjr.com.

I used the DHCP guide, DNS guide, LAMP server guide and Mail Server Guide posted here in the guides forum to do those services. In fact, I wrote the guides while building my server.

Here is the firewall script I use ... I put it in /etc/rc.d ... it is named rc.firewall ... it is set to chmod 750 and runs on startup by putting a line that says /etc/rc.d/rc.firewall in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and making sure the normal iptables does not start.

http://www.hughesjr.com/wbel/rc.firewall.txt