server connectivity is brilliantly tough, you are bound to hit problems. You can tryout Internet forums, try your own luck, or you can e-mail me. The problems vary greatly and are dependent on many things, such as the USB drive not being found, or you not being able to connect to the Internet. Take these problems head-on and overcome them. Remember that this server has no enterprise support.

We are not building this server as an expensive Internet browsing machine. We will eventually set up the server role-by-role. I did want to set up every piece of software from the sources, but ran out of patience. Hundreds of dependencies, and equally high compile times, made it an exhausting task. Thus the controversial choice of the OS. (Whoa use a desktop OS as a server?)

There are advantages to using Ubuntu. It's a very simple to use Debian-based distribution. We can tweak it exactly to our needs. Even now if you think KDE4 is too heavy for a server, issue apt-get install xubuntu¬desktop to go with XFCE 4.4.2. Brilliant!

Next month, we will start setting up our server. We will first set up the DHCP services. Then comes the setting up of a TFTP server as the first real server role. (TFTP is kind of useless, but it is used to remote-boot PCs over the network using PXE.) We will also set up a firewall, following which we will set up a basic LLMPPP (Linux-LightTPD-MySQL-PHP-Python3-Perl) stack for our Web apps. (If you doubt LightTPD's power, it is used by both Wikipedia and YouTube, and they're seldom, if ever, down!)

In the subsequent months, we will start by setting up a complete Web and database server, an e-mail server, fax, IRC and Jabber (for chat), virtualisation, file &torage (FTP), print and media streaming, in that order. You can skip any function you like, and you can ask me to add roles that you may want. I'm open to suggestions and contributions, in the true spirit of FOSS.

For now, go and purchase another network card, and a network hub. Configure the new NIC as eth1 with an IP address of 192.168.1/24. This will be the IP address that all the PCs in your network will know as the server. Connect eth1 to the hub. All the PCs in your network will connect to the hub in a Star-Bus Topology [see sidebox].
I also suggest that you do some research on basic networking, the Ring and Star topologies, and CSA (Client Server Architecture). This will help, as you will know what you are doing.
See you next month!