I recently bought a new domain and I’ve been very busy setting it up. I’m using ZoneEdit.com to control DNS. It’s a nice service because it’s free. I registered the domain through GoDaddy.com and they have a DNS management utility but it doesn’t give me the same freedom.

So I’ve got space hosted on godaddy.com (www2.bronow.net) and I’m using Google for Domains to host email for bronow.net but I’ve also got a Windows Server 2003 Small Business Server running at the house. The SBS machine is serving up www.bronow.net as well as providing the mail server (via Exchange) for hal.bronow.net. I’m using 2 mail servers on different subdomains so I can try them both seperately to decide which one I want to keep.

Google for Domains is nice because all the traffic and storage (2GB per user account) is on their server. The drawback is I’m limited to 10 users and I don’t get fancy filtering or routing rules like Exchange. At this point I’m happy enough with Google’s service that I’ll keep using it until I get a faster Exchange server.

As far as hardware goes: Eve found me a 20U server rack on Craigslist for $60. I put that in the crawlspace where it would stay dry and ran an extension cord to it. I put 1 500 watt and 2 280 watt UPS’s in the bottom so all the networking hardware is powered seperately from the servers. The cable modem is connected to a 4 port switch which provides me 4 public IP’s from Comcast. I’m using a Linksys WRT54G to do DHCP and firewalling to the wireless and wired network. A Linksys 24 port switch provides all the ethernet connections I need to the router. I’ve also got a ZyWALL hardware VPN with its WAN port connected to the 4 port external switch and LAN port connected to the Linksys internal switch with static routes setup in the router to point requests for other domains through their appropriate tunnels. The SBS box has a public IP (through the external switch) and an internal IP (through the Linksys switch) so it can perform the duties of a domain controller (DNS, backup, Sharepoint, local Exchange, etc) and act as an IIS web server.