Help "specing" home network

[dangerstat]

Hi All,

Well I think it's finally time to properly sort out my home network and replace / upgrade it all.

I was hoping you guys could walk me through what I need and how to achieve it.

Basically I have to two systems which I access via ssh or VNC to do development on, but I don't want them to be on all the time (just when I want to use them). One is a Intel Mac and the other a multicore standard desktop with a decent GPU (for CUDA work).

Now at the moment I use a relatively high performance PC to do the remote dev work which seems pointless? I was thinking of replacing it with a low power Atom based machine whose sole duty is to access the other machines - and perhaps play a video or two. How easy is it to WoL so that if I'm on the atom machine and need some extra "grunt" it'll startup the other machines so I can ssh into them?

Also at the moment I have a USB attached Laser printer which I want to be able to access from any machine on the network - is there such a thing as a USB - Network print server?

With repsect to the network itself, I'm just using one 8 port swtich to connect all the machines, but I want to move to a situation where I have all the local machines connected in a trusted way (is that a DMZ?) and a seperate area for things that are connected to the web with little filtering. How do I achieve this?

I'd appreciate any help and advice as I'm really a n00b with respect to setting up a "proper" network.

 

[dangerstat]

Easy things first - USB > Network print servers do exist. Run you about £30 or so.

Wake on Lan is not difficult, even easier if you do not want to do it over the WAN which can become a Pain in the ass. Assuming your NICs/Motherbaords support it this should be childsplay. Integrated NICs will WoL easily, an expansion NIC will no doubt need the WoL cable connected to the motherboard.

No idea about macs but some wiki blurb seems to indicate you can do it:



You can DMZ with a Layer 3 switch and VLANs but it is easier to just do it on a router that supports DMZing, cheaper too.

What does "layer 3" mean?

Oh and thanks very much for the commenets on the USB > printer server comments and WOL mac.

 

[dangerstat]

Okay I still need loads of help on this if that's okay, as I'm going to configure this all this week.

So I want it to look like this.

Four machines (LC1, LC2, LCS1 and OC1) and NAS will be connected to a 10/100/1000 switch (standard cheapy netgear jobbie). One port will be connected to another 10/100 switch, this in turn has a mobile broadband router connected to one port accepting wireless connections from one specified MAC address (that belonging to my laptop). I want the laptop to be able to connect via SSH, VNC, SFTP and WoL all the machines connected on the 1000 router but I want to filter very carefully anything that passes betweek the 10/100 swtich and the 10/100/1000 swtich - so do I need to replace the 10/100 swtich with a L3 one?