A long time ago, I used to run real servers at home – I had a Compaq Prosignia 300 for a while and then a Compaq (or maybe it was an HP) Proliant DL380 running in my garage. Then, a few years back, I stopped running my own mail server and put all of the infrastructure services onto a low-powered PC running Windows Server (working alongside a NetGear ReadyNAS Duo). Recently, I found I didn’t even need Active Directory (I have unmanaged devices and cloud services these days) so I started to switch over onto a Raspberry Pi.  Each move made a huge difference to my electricity bill but I’ve had some mishaps too. I accidentally turned off the Pi and corrupted the flash memory (oops), then recommissioned the previous server. Then, I accidentally killed the power on that too and it’s not come back up (could be the PSU, or the motherboard – but whichever it is it’s unlikely to get fixed) so last Saturday night, I found myself bringing the Pi back into service as a DNS, DHCP and TFTP server – partly to improve my Internet access speeds and partly to back up my Windows Phone (that will be the subject of another blog post).

Luckily, I had the notes from last time I did it – but they hadn’t made it into a blog post yet, so I’d better record them in case I need to do this again…
Assuming that the Raspberry Pi is running Raspbian, the following commands should be entered from command line (e.g. LX Terminal):

• sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces (to set up static IP – in this case 192.168.1.10 on a class C network):
  #iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet staticaddress 192.168.1.10
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.0
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1
• sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf (to set the DNS server address – 8.8.8.8 will do if you don’t have one):
  nameserver 8.8.8.8
• sudo ifdown eth0 (take down the Ethernet connection).
• sudo ifup eth0 (bring it back up again).
• ifconfig (check new IP settings.)
• sudo apt-get install dnsmasq (install the Dnsmasq network infrastructure package for small networks)
• Optionally, sudo apt-get install dnsutils (to get utilities like nslookup and dig). Unfortunately, this is resulting in bash: dig: command not found (I’m pretty sure it worked when I did this a year or so ago but, for now, I’m managing without those tools.
• sudo service dnsmasq stop (stop the Dnsmasq service)
• sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf (edit the Dnsmasq config) – these are the settings I changed (all others were left alone) – the original version of the file includes full details of what each of these mean):
  domain-needed
bogus-priv
no-resolv
server=212.159.13.49
server=212.159.13.50
server=212.159.6.9
server=208.67.222.222
server=208.67.220.220
server=8.8.8.8
local=/home.markwilson.co.uk/
expand-hosts
domain=home.markwilson.co.uk
dhcp-range=192.168.1.100,192.168.1.199
dhcp-host=00:1d:a2:2f:20:f9,192.168.1.199
dhcp-option=3,192.168.1.1
dhcp-option=6,192.168.1.10
dhcp-option=42,192.168.1.1
dhcp-option=66,192.168.1.10
dhcp-option=66,boot\pxeboot.com
dhcp-option=vendor:MSFT,2,li
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/home/pi/ftp/files
• Optionally, add some static entries for fixed IP items on the network with sudo nano /etc/hosts:
  192.168.1.1 router
192.168.1.10 raspberrypi
• sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf (set the DNS server address again – to use the local server):
  nameserver 192.168.1.10
• sudo service dnsmasq start (start the Dnsmasq service)
• View client leases with cat /var/lib/misc/dnsmasq.leases.

A few more notes that might be useful include that pinging short names may need a trailing . .
Other blog posts that helped me in creating this include:

• Andrew Oberstar’s post on Raspberry Pi as a Server: DNS and DHCP.
• Use your RPI as a DNS server and speed up yo’ net!
• Mohan43u’s Dnsmasq for Home User[s].

(I haven’t actually tested the TFTP functionality – I need it for my Cisco 7940 phone, but need to recover the files from the old server first).

Now, all I need is a UPS for my Pi – and it looks like one is available (but I’m waiting for the new version that can keep the device running a while on battery power too…)