The configuration wizards, which come with Mandrake Linux, give you the ability to make configurations quickly and efficiently in a private network. In this chapter, we will suppose that your network is as shown in figure 15-1, and that Mandrake Linux is installed on the server. Configuring and bringing up the Internet connection (if you have one) is out of the scope of this chapter.
Wizards can help you configure the following:
Basic Network Configuration Wizard: setting up the IP address of your network adapter (the one connected to the internal network), and the name of the server;
DHCP Server Configuration: your server will be able to dynamically assign IP addresses to new machines on the network;
Configuring the DNS Server: configuring name resolutions for machines outside the private network;
Client Hosts DNS Configuration: identifying static machines names and IPs inside your local network;
Mail server configuration: configuring your mail domain for sending and receiving mail from the outside;
Samba configuration: if the server is to act as a file or print server for Windows machines, this wizard will help you setup public shared files and printers, and announce their names into the Windows network;
Firewalling configuration: as your server presumably acts as the gateway to the outside world, you will be able to set the firewalling policy here;
web server configuration: here you will be able to specify whether your web server will be reachable from the outside network, or from the internal network, or both;
FTP server configuration: as for the web server configuration, you will be able to specify from where your FTP server should be reachable;
News configuration: you can make your server act as a local mirror of an external news server;
Time server: your machine can also give time to other machines using the NTP protocol (Network Time Protocol); this wizard will help you configure this service.
Note for experienced users: wizards are limited to configure only C class networks, and only the basic configuration is handled for each service. This should be enough for most situations, but if you wish a more fine-tuned configuration, you will have to edit the configuration files by hand.
The server configuration wizards are available through the Control Center. When the wizdrake package is installed, a new menu entry appears in the Mandrake Control Center tree menu (figure 15-2).
It is advised to begin by the global wizard which will in fact run all wizards one after the other in the appropriate order.
You will also be able to access wizards individually by clicking on the corresponding menu entry. In this chapter wizards will be described in the order meant by the global wizard.