Dnsmasq.
One thing that you home router provides is internet protocol addresses to every machine on the network with out you having to manually assign the ipaddresses (aka computer telephone numbers) to all the systems that request an address. It also associates hostnames for system connected to it like a telephone book. If for some reason your router fails, you can use an existing system to replace those services. You just need to install a software package known as Dnsmasq. In fact. that is the exact software most routers use to be a localize domain name services. You will want to use an extra nic so that later you can turn the system into a router. From the Debian wiki. Dnsmasq is a lightweight, easy to configure, DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It is designed to provide DNS and optionally, DHCP, to a small network. It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines with DHCP-...