Setting up Amahi within a shared office network

[Brimfulof]

Hi,

In the new year I'm going to be moving my two-person business into a shared office (i.e. shared with other businesses). We will have access to the internet through the building's wireless network and may be able to connect through a wired LAN.

I'd really appreciate any thoughts or advice on how best to set this up. I'm looking for any advice on extra equipment or software and particularly on how I need to set up Amahi to make this all work.

I've got a server (Currently Fedora 10/Amahi 4, but will be upgraded to F12/A5) and 2 desktops (1 XP Home, 1 Vista Home) with 2 laptops and 2 netbooks (1 Linpus, 1 XP home) that will be used occasionally. As you may guess this is all a bit cobbled together and I don't have huge amounts of cash for hardware/software. I'm considering switching all non-server OSs to Linux (recommendations on this front also very welcome).

So the real question is how do I get the full use of the Amahi server in this environment? I want all of my computers to connect to the server (and through that to the internet) rather than direct to the building's wifi. What I was intending to do was buy a wireless router, connect that to the building's LAN with CAT5, and then connect the Amahi server and 2 desktops to that (wired connections) and have the laptops and netbooks connecting to that wireless router rather than the building's. Will that work, will Amahi manage that 'sub-network' without getting in the way of anything else?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[moredruid]

in short: yes that would be possible but you will need to make sure your network is segmented from the other (building) network. This can get quite complicated (you'll need to have bridging set up in your router from your network to the buildings') to make sure your own network doesn't interfere with the buildings' network or that you suddenly (and inadvertedly) serve the whole building with your amahi server. You have sufficient resources available to test this (with all those laptops etc).

For migrating all your desktops to linux I can only say: try a few distros (You've obviously already tried Fedora & Linpus): Ubuntu comes to mind, Linux Mint is also very userfriendly I hear. OpenSUSE is also an option (although I hate it because of Yast). I think Fedora, Ubuntu & OpenSUSE are your best options since they are all well known and have large communities for support.

If you want to go die-hard you can choose Debian, Gentoo or Linux From Scratch (in order of easy to hard).

good luck!

[cpg]

i think it should be fine, i don't think it's complex. think of it like this: the shared office is like the cable modem - if you connect directly into your modem, you can see your neighbors traffic.

you just get yourself a regular $50 router/gateway/wireless access point that has a firewall and connect the WAN port to your shared (with others) office network.

the local ports you can connect to your HDA and to any other clients you want to set up.

as for linux clients, it depends on what you need to do in your office ...

[Brimfulof]

That's great, thanks for the reassurance.

Off to see if I can get some cheap monitors in the sales now!

Happy New Year everyone.

[moredruid]

hmmm just today I was looking at a very tempting ad of a 24" Iiyama monitor (full HD) for just over € 150...
my 2 19" monitors are still looking very good though. It'll probably be another 2 HDD's I fear.

[Brimfulof]

So I've been trying to set this up at home to test it before taking it into the shared office space. I've come up with a significant problem; hopefully if I can explain it one of you kind, knowledgeable folks may be able to help me with it.

Set up:

{Cable modem} wired connection to the WAN port of
{Router1} - This is pretending to be the router everyone in the building will connect to. It is set up as a DHCP server and has a wired connection to the WAN port of
{Router2} - My router (DHCP turned off). This has a wired connection to
{PC1} and {HDA} which is set up as DHCP server

So the problem is that if {HDA} is not connected {PC1} can connect to the internet. Once {HDA} is connected {PC1} can go to http://hda/ but cannot connect to the internet.

Is it likely to be a problem with the IP settings in my {HDA}? They are still the same as when I originally set the system up, connected to {Router1}.

[moredruid]

hmmm sounds like there's something wrong in the gateway settings.
did you appoint router2 (your own router) as the gateway or router1 (the building router) as your gateway?

you might need to fiddle with extra routes to get it to work properly.

[Brimfulof]

Thanks moredruid. I'll look into that and see which is set as the gateway and try out different combinations.

[moredruid]

oh and if you can reach the hda by http://hda
can you try to ping google from your desktop and the hda?
or ping the google.com IP address (so you don't rely on DNS): 74.125.79.104

that might give us some more clues.

[Brimfulof]

So I changed the gateway address in the Network Settings on Fedora to point to {Router2} rather than {Router 1} and now I can access the internet directly from the HDA, but not from the clients.

It doesn't seem to be DNS as when I tried to ping http://www.google.com it converted it to an IP address. I.e. it returned:

Pinging http://www.google.com [67.215.65.132] with 32 bytes of data.

The ping didn't get any response though.

Pinging IP addresses directly didn't work from the client.

Could it be anything to do with the IP ranges? These are the IP addresses at the moment:

{Router 1} 192.168.50.1
{Router 2} 192.168.50.5
{HDA} 192.168.50.10
{Clients} 192.168.50.100-200