XPS-Master wrote on 2023-12-31, 02:19:
I'm looking to maximize the usefulness of it for supporting old hardware since it will already be my bridge point and i'm investing the money into it.
I'm open to any ideas, but I will already be using an NT3.51, NT4, and Win2K servers/DCs so no overlap of those roles needed.
On my home LAN, mostly underpinned by a Pi4, I run a boot server. It is very useful for jumping into various OSes on PCs, and helps work around the lack of floppy drives here: memdisk and a floppy image can be good enough. I updated a BIOS and Intel manglement engine with floppy images just the other week. With a decent chunk of RAM whole HDD images can be booted too, I have a FreeDOS image with Phil's DOS benchmark added, for example.
The boot server offers multiple custom live versions of Debian, Kali, 3 anti-virus recovery CDs, several stock Debian Live CDs, Debian installers, System rescue CD, GParted, Clonezilla, Slackware installers and LiveSlak. FreeDOS, Win98SE DOS, a DOS network boot disk, netboot.xyz (even more OSes, straight off the internet), local HDD boot options, memtest and Hardware Detection Tool.
PXE can boot 16, 32 and 64 bit OSes, and recently I have got UEFI working too. I think that can only boot 64bit OSes. Using grub-syslinux2cfg the pxelinux menu can be converted to a grub menu, which UEFI network booting can use.
The Pi is an 8GB Pi4, and is the LAN's internet router. I use a VLAN so the one ethernet port can be used for the private LAN, and so the Pi can communicate with the ADSL modem.
A boot server needs a few programs. It needs DHCP (I use isc-dhcpd), a TFTP server (I use tftpd-hpa), and http (I use lighttpd) and/or NFS and/or CIFS for bigger OSes. I don't have a permanent NFS server, but have looked into it for the odd thing, like netbooting Finnix on a PowerPC Mac Mini.
My Pi uses autoisofs to loopback mount ISO files off the NAS as files from within ISOs are requested from the Pi. This is how root filesystem images are served for netbooting.
Another nice thing that can be done with a bootloader on the LAN is that you can change the default OS of dual-boot PC, and then reboot into the other OS, remotely. This is done by chain loading from PXE Linux to partitions on the local HDD.
One custom Debian Live I made is a rescue system. All the PCs on the LAN are set to have network booting enabled, and the rescue system is the default OS to boot off the LAN. If a PC's boot disk dies, and the PC crashes and reboots, then the PC will not sit there saying it cannot boot. It should boot into the rescue system, making itself available again on the LAN for diagnostics or attempted recovery.
I run a time server from the Pi, there's a battery-backed up real time clock in it. I use ntpd on the Pi, but when I move the 32bit Rasbian to 64bit I will move to OpenNTP: That can be locked down more. systemd-timesyncd is disabled.
I don't run a specific retro LAN, other than an up/down virtual one[1], but if I did I might run a lying NTP server. Stands to help work around 2k bugs and maybe trial-ware or betas. I have a file FakeNTP.py but I cannot find where I got it from. But there's lots of fake NTP implementations out there, and so if you want retro PCs to all be exactly 25 years slow, it's doable.
A customisation on the DHCP server is that any DHCP client that identifies as Microsoft is not given a gateway address. That prevents any Microsoft operating systems from being able to find the internet, a crucial security measure.
IPv6 is off on any LAN connected interfaces, on any computer, too.
With some voltage level adjustments, you can link PC serial to GPIO on a Pi. With a fake modem running on the Pi, kit that has nothing but serial and only supports modems can be connected up.
My Pi runs apt-cacher-ng to proxy and cache Debian (and derivatives) packages. I have modified its config so it works with Slackware packages, too. The cached data is stored on a USB HDD on the Pi, which also holds the TFTP server directory tree and the web server's root.
The Pi runs BIND, so I have full forward and backward DNS for the LAN, which gets rid of various hangs when logging into things. Also, I can do convenient things like "ping ip4" rather than type the whole LAN IP. DNS has adblocking, lying to clients about advert and tracking hosts/domains. I could not get the Windows 10 ISO downloaded when using this adblocking, though, like so many services the content is becoming dependent on the corporate-malware functioning.
Use a top level domain that is meant to be used for private use. I picked a TLD that exists on the internet, because I thought it did not exist at all, and now no name resolution works here for any site from one Caribbean island nation 😀 I used .network in the past at another house, only for that TLD to appear on the internet! I didn't learn, clearly.
My install of Raspbian has been upgraded and upgraded, what the Raspbian fanbois present as evil. Well, if you know why you shouldn't do it you can, because you might understand that some packages need manually installing. Kernel package names have changed, and at one upgrade I lost all USB. On Pi3s and earlier that is a show-stopper 😀 But going 32bit to 64bit is too gnarly, and I am currently working on migrating everything to 64bit Raspbian, setting up a parallel router on a Pi3. Once happy it works, I'll move the SD card to the Pi4 and inevitably have to fix a few things. I recommend you start this project on a 64bit distro.
[1] Got a whole NT estate on my desktop! All the esoteric options, an emulated MIPS NT4 DC, NT3.51 member server, NT4EE, NT4TSE, OpenNT (the thing compiled from leaked NT4 source), and some NT5/2k betas.
