Providing Net services for the new flat

[ciphergoth]

Geek-only content follows. We currently have cable Internet, with a Linux box providing firewalling and NAT to get the rest of the flat online. Email, web pages, domain hosting etc are done through a colocated box (antipope.org) on which I've configured bind, exim and apache appropriately. It's not this way purely out of geek snobbery - this is actually the only way of providing these things that I actually understand.

However, now we're going our separate ways this probably isn't the most sensible way to do things. When purplerabbits and sibelian move to their new flat, I'd like to set stuff up so they're independent of whatever solutions I have set upon antipope.org.

If I am thinking of it all correctly, they need:

1. A broadband connection (no cable where they're going so this has to be ADSL)
2. Some way of spreading the Internet goodness to all the computers in the flat (eg a NAT box)
3. At least three POP or IMAP accessible email boxes, one for each flatmate
4. Name server records for at least three domains
5. Static web pages for each domain
6. A way of sending outgoing email with a From: field from any domain they own
7. Arbitrary forwarding of many email addresses in those domains, to their own POP/IMAP boxes or to other addresses (eg to me).

So what should they do to get the above services,and how much will it cost? Should they get their ADSL provider to do the lot, and if so which provider should they go to? Should I configure a Linux box to provide NAT as before, or should they get a router and several real IP addresses - in which case, how should they do firewalling? The names are currently registered with gandi.net - can/should they stay that way or will one ISP want to do name registration on top of everything else?

What haven't I thought of?

This is all a bit of a step into the unknown for me, and none of the people in the new flat are serious techies, so straightforward, well understood solutions are very much to be preferred over interesting, innovative, or technically neat ones.

Update: I really appreciate the responses I'm getting here, they're very helpful, please keep them coming!

Comments

[barakta]

The good ADSL ISP's that I know of these days are Nildram, Zen and PlusNet. As far as I know Zen do a block of free IP addresses with one of their ADSL offers. Nildram have been very good with my SO and myself their customer services are quite helpful and they send out alerts for the few times they take things offline, or when they know BT is screwing around with things.

As for a NAT box, maybe some custom linux builds like smoothwall or ipcop (I think they are both essentially the same thing) are worth looking into, they provide a customised kernel and are easy to use even for a non 'geek' type. They allow you to configure all the usual thingss.

I can't think of much else, but then if I am honest my SO does all that and is very fascistic about anyone else jibbling her setup; I am sane and leave well alone.

As for prices, all three of those ISPs are pretty similar and have pretty good speeds and uptime. The only thing I would recommend strong is NOT to go with BTOpenworld, they are terrible going offline ALL the time and more often being so utterly crap that the connection just lags to hell therby requiring restarting to get any kind of bandwidth out of them.

Other than that, hope some other helpful person fills in my gaps.

Natalya

[softfruit.livejournal.com]

Just to echo a couple of points on that, having just gone over to plus.net for broadband they are very good - as a low-grade nerd I like the fact that you can submit "tickets" for queries or problems and check up on their progress through the system, rather than spending half an hour on hold in a phone system. 250Mb of web space is fab for me but might not be enough for those guys - you'll know better than me on that.

Also, some of our machines in work are on BTOpenworld broadband, and it's a disaster area. Plus.net is much stabler.

[kimble.livejournal.com]

Seconded - the IPCop/Smoothwall distros will give you the standard NAT/firewall/web+DNS proxies etc, all configurable from a web frontend (although you can also SSH in and jibble things the geek way). They support those evil USB stingray modems, as well as assorted ISDN hardware and anything that speaks ethernet. I don't know about PCI ADSL modem support, but I'm sure it's in the pipeline. Last time I looked, neither supported non-NAT subnets directly, but if you know your way round ipchains/iptables I'm sure it would be reasonably straightforward to make it work.

I've been hosting low-bandwidth-web/DNS/email/etc services on a Nildram ADSL connection for a couple of years now, and found that the uptime is perfectly adequate for an SMTP server - any NAT router worth it's salt will be capable of forwarding the relevant ports to a server on the internal subnet. If at all possible, avoid hosting the primary and secondary DNS servers for a domain on the same ADSL line, for obvious reasons.