As part of my experiments to fix my gaming issues, I had uninstalled the DNS and DHCP servers from my Linux server. I don’t think that helped. But the new D-Link DIR 825 router definitely is not up to the job. All local DNS queries times out or takes forever. I did not want to install them on the same server only to have it uinstalled sometime later. That is the server where I have my file share (Samba) and mySQL running. I have a very old laptop sitting idle. I thought that was a good candidate for bare-bones Linux server. I did a bit of a search and finally decided to stick to OpenSuse. The only reason is my familiarity with this distribution.
Got the latest version: that is OpenSuse 11.1. Chrome failed to download the DVD image from the site. I installed FlashGet for IE and it is downloaded without a problem. Installed it with text GUI and minimal components required for DHCP and DNS. This laptop has only a 20GB HDD and 512MB RAM and a Pentium 4 processor. I was able to install Windows 7 Beta on it. So, Linux should not have any issues running. During this exercise the laptop died once. Battery is almost dead. It must be connected to power all the time.
After spending about 8 hours or so, I have the DHCP and DNS servers running. My home network is faster again. If you have multiple computers, none of the routers will do a good job routing data within the local network. Windows is less affected than Linux machines. Once I installed the DNS and DHCP servers, communication between Linux servers and and Windows desktops have improved a lot. PuTTY sessions were painfully slow.
Accessing my web servers from outside was also slow. I confirmed that this is a lot better now. A good use of a laptop that is not good enough for anything else.