Web hosting on home network

[ike2010]

Hello all. I'm planning on creating a personal web site and host it on my home network. It will only be accessed occassionally by friends, family, and myself for pictures, events, files, etc. Pretty basic stuff. I will be putting it on my Red Hat 9 box using Apache. I have an XP Pro box and Mac OS X box on the same 4 port Linksys router (which is hooked to my cable modem). My question is this: Should I put the Linux box in the DMZ? The reason I'm asking is if someone gets through the firewall and into the Linux box then they have cleared that hurtle and might have easier access to the other machines. But if the Linux box is in the DMZ then they still haven't gotten through the firewall built into the Linksys router. I'm kind of new to this, so any tips would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[mboy]

That is not a real DMZ. All it does is forward all the ports to that LAN IP. The wb server would still be on the same subnet so they are already thru that hurdle.
What you need is either a REAL firewall with a seperate physical WAN port (DMZ) that you can place the box in on a 3rd subnet. Otherwise, you are just better off forwarding port 80 on the linksys (altho I would change that in Apache and make it a different port other then 80 or 8080). Especially if only friends and family are using it, just tell them to add : "whatever port#" at the end of the address.
Placing the box in the Linksys DMZ exposes ANY port that is open with a service associated with it which is MUCH worse then forwarding the 1 port.

 

[ike2010]

thanks for clearing that up about the DMZ. i'll just forward port 80 to my linux box for now. i don't want to spend any more money on this since it's basically just a project.

 

[BlitzRommel]

Originally posted by: ike2010
thanks for clearing that up about the DMZ. i'll just forward port 80 to my linux box for now. i don't want to spend any more money on this since it's basically just a project.

For security reasons, that's a good thing to do anyway.

 

[frofan]

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