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

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

Andrews and Arnold (http://aaisp.net/) do very good ADSL - they're a bit on the expensive side, but their light use (http://aaisp.net/home500light.html) package is pretty good if the people it's for don't work from home. They do as many real IP addresses as you need, and in my experience configuring a linux firewall for real IP addresses is easier and more flexible than doing NAT.

Vis-a-vis the internet services you want to run, you can either opt to have A&A provide them for you or do them over the ADSL. A&A will probably charge a little bit more for what you want (I'd have guessed £50 a year or similar), but they'll certainly be able to do it, and that way you can have someone else handle that for you. The alternative, as you say, is to provide it yourself over the ADSL.

Many people advocate having a seperate server for security, in a home context I think this is rather pointless. The only server you need to configure that you haven't already is IMAP/POP3 - courier (http://www.inter7.com/courierimap.html) is very good in my experience. I'm not sure what you mean about the From header, as every client I've ever used has allowed me to specify it. Something else you might want to set up is some sort of webmail for checking mail remotely, in which case Squirrelmail (http://www.squirrelmail.org/) is excellent and doesn't rely on anything you won't have apart from PHP.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

A&A replied *instantly* and in detail to my sales enquiry - I'm very impressed! They can do everything I asked for, and they charge GBP 90 setup fee, GPB 28 per month for the ADSL service, plus GBP 4.70 per domain per month.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Here's their response.

[hythloday.livejournal.com]

A&A are extremely impressive. The two times things have gone wrong (in about 2 years) they've been fixed within 15 minutes - once at 9PM and once at 1AM. They are more expensive than their competition but IMO it's definitely a case of getting what you pay for.