Zentyal As A Gateway: The Perfect Setup

Zentyal is the Linux Small Business Server, it lets you manage all your network services through one single platform. It's a Network Gateway, as well as an Infrastructure, UTM (Unified Threat Manager), Office and Communications Server. All these features are fully integrated and easy to configure, it truly helps to save system administrators time.

In this tutorial you will see how to set up a Zentyal Server to act as a gateway in a very common scenario. Zentyal will provide basic network infrastructure, load balancing between two Internet providers, firewall and HTTP proxy caching and content filtering. All these steps are well explained in the Zentyal Documentation, which is a really recommended reading. The following example network layout is used:

Zentyal runs on top of Ubuntu Server so it will work on the same hardware. You can take a look at the Ubuntu-certified hardware page for more information. There are two ways to install Zentyal:

Using Zentyal installer that you can download from the project website. This is the recommended choice, it includes all package dependencies for offline install and also makes some custom configuration.Install on top of a working Ubuntu Server, you can find detailed info and URL for the repository in the Zentyal Installation Guide.

If you install Zentyal using the installer you will see this screen when booting from CD-ROM and a couple of wizards will guide you through the process. You can choose default settings in all of them.

Zentyal provides a web administration interface, after the installation a Firefox browser will show up giving you access to it (you can also access Zentyal from any client browser typing: https://zentyal_server_ip). User and password are the same you entered during installation.

Now you can select the desired packages to install, for this tutorial you should install the Gateway package. Later DHCP and DNS modules will also be installed by using the Software Management module.

After this step all the necessary packages are installed, now setup will guide you through configuration wizards for installed modules, in this case Network and Users. We can skip network configuration for now, so if you start this tutorial from an already installed Zentyal you can still follow it.

Zentyal Server is now installed. By following the next steps you will configure each module.

As shown in the scenario, you have to configure three network interfaces, two external routers and one for the internal network. Zentyal will balance traffic between the two Internet connections.

Go to Network -> Interfaces and configure each interface by introducing its IP and netmask. Don't forget to mark external interfaces because Zentyal uses this info in firewall rules. In the next image you can see configuration for one of the external interfaces and the internal one.

Now you have to set up both gateways in the gateways table (Network -> Gateways):

Go to Network -> Balance Traffic to enable load balancing between the gateways.

Zentyal As A Gateway: The Perfect Setup - Page 2

Installing A Multiserver Setup With Dedicated Web, Email, DNS And MySQL Database Servers On Debian 5.0 With ISPConfig 3

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Last edited 08/10/2010

This tutorial describes the installation of an ISPConfig 3 multiserver setup with dedicated web, email, database and two DNS servers all managed trough a single ISPConfig 3 control panel. The setup described below uses five servers and can be extended easily to to a higher number of servers by just adding more servers. E.g. if you want to have two mailservers, do the setup steps from chapter 2 on both of these servers. If you want to set up more web servers, then install ISPConfig on all other web servers in expert mode except of the first one.

 

1 Installing The Five Debian Base Systems

In this setup there will be one master server (which runs the web server and ISPConfig control panel interface) and four slave servers for database, email and DNS.

To install the clustered setup, we need five servers (or virtual servers) with a Debian 5.0 minimal install. The base setup is described in the following tutorial in the steps 1 - 6:

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-debian-lenny-ispconfig3

Install only steps 1 - 6 of the perfect server tutorial and not the other steps as they differ for a clustered setup!

In my example I use the following hostnames and IP addresses for the five servers:

Web Server

Hostname: web.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.105

Mail Server

Hostname: mail.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.106

DB Server

Hostname: db.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.107

DNS Server (primary)

Hostname: ns1.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.108

DNS Server (secondary)

Hostname: ns2.example.tld
IP address: 192.168.0.109

Whereever these hostnames or IP addresses occur in the next installation steps you will have to change them to match the IP's and hostnames of your servers.

 

2 Installing The Web Server

Edit the hosts file and add the IP addresses and hostnames for all servers. The hostnames and IP addresses have to be adjusted to match your setup.

vi /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 localhost192.168.0.105 web.example.tld192.168.0.106 mail.example.tld192.168.0.107 db.example.tld192.168.0.108 ns1.example.tld192.168.0.109 ns2.example.tld # The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopbackfe00::0 ip6-localnetff00::0 ip6-mcastprefixff02::1 ip6-allnodesff02::2 ip6-allroutersff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Set the hostname of the server:

echo web.example.tld > /etc/hostname
/etc/init.d/hostname.sh start

Edit the sources.list file...

vi /etc/apt/sources.list

... and ensure that it contains the following line to enable the volatile repository.

deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

Run...

apt-get update

... to update the apt package database; then run...

apt-get upgrade

... to install the latest updates (if there are any).

It is a good idea to synchronize the system clock with an NTP (network time protocol) server over the Internet. Simply run...

apt-get -y install ntp ntpdate

... and your system time will always be in sync.

Install the MySQL server. A MySQL server instance is necessary on every server as ISPConfig uses it to sync the configuration between the servers.

apt-get -y install mysql-client mysql-server

Enter the new password for MySQL when requested by the installer.

We want MySQL to listen on all interfaces on the master server, not just localhost, therefore we edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and comment out the line bind-address