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I'm not sure how i'm going to do this but this is my situation, i have 4 DELL 1U rack servers, fourth will be for web, third will be for email, second will be for MySQL and i want the first to be the 'controller'. Each of the servers are on a gigabit network and the Internet connection to it will be from a ethernet connection, i want the first server to use this connection and it will then know where to send the requests on the LAN so for example i could SSH into user@mailserver.mydomain.com or user@mysql.mydomain.com from the outside world and get 'into' the local network of servers. Is this possible and how so?

What professional hardware is actually used in the server industry that acts as the router/gateway to the WAN that is more reliable than my home broadband router, can you get them with multiple WAN connections?

Thanks, Dave

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To do this you would need to setup DNS for mailserver.mydomain.com, mysql.mydomain.com etc so that these resolve to an IP on your 'controller' or internet facing server/router.

If you have more than one public IP you can then NAT these different IP's through to the different servers behind the firewall/controller server and you have achieved what you want. If you don't have more than 1 IP then you will need to NAT different ports through to servers behind your firewall. e.g ssh normally runs on port 22, you will need to allocate a different port for your mail server vs MSSQL server and include the port on your SSH request.

An alternative and possibly better solution would be to run a VPN server (maybe openvpn which is free) on your public facing server, VPN in using the VPN client and then just use the internal server names to SSH to directly. This is generally recognised as being a more secure method for remote access.

Hope this helps,

C

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Thanks, it does help. I will get onto my ISP for some more public IP's. Would i use BIND DNS server in Ubuntu to resolve the LAN IP address of the local servers? – David Maitland Nov 7 '10 at 12:28
you could do yes, or setup A records on your public domain which resolve to internal addresses on your LAN, note these won't be externally usable but still resolvable, you could do something like this: mailserver.mydomain.com for public routeable mailserver.int.mydomain.com for internal/admin use mysql.mydomain.com for public mysql.int.mydomain.com for internal/admin use only you/people with access to the internal LAN would use the int.mydomain.com hosts for admin purposes. – ccame Nov 7 '10 at 12:41
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