As per the site title, this blog is all about Christians and open source software, and how to use OSS in church and Christian organisations. We've discussed introducing and ultimately converting your church to OSS, and asked you what OSS you use in your church.

After blogging about these things, I thought it might be a good idea to write up a How To for those folks who use Linux on a regular basis, and want to set up a central Linux server at their church office.

My server setup at home works pretty well, so I am going to tell you how to make a similar setup.

The Details

• DHCP for assigning IP addresses to computers on the network
• DNS for caching of domain names, and serving the local server's internal domain name
• Samba for filesharing
• CUPS for a shared printer
• Arno's IPTables Firewall
• Apache HTTP server for web based app(s)
• Jethro PMM for membership management

With more and more churches these days having an online presence, and with recent moves toward digitizing everything, a lot of churches are recording their sermons and putting the sermons on their web sites.

For churches that have not yet climbed onto this new bandwagon, it can seem a little daunting to start. They may wonder what new sound equipment they need to buy, as well as what special computers with special sound cards and expensive software are necessary to record their sermons.