FW: [Malvern] Recommendations for File Servers

[Ian Pascoe]

Many thanks to Darren and Stuart P

A couple of questions / responses.

Any particular reason for using a PC as a fire wall instead of a piece of
software?  I presume that you use this PC in place of a router?  Although I
have a router I am not convienced about its management of ports so as I
already have Norton Firewall on my windows partition I am just duplicating
that within the Linux distros.

Darren - the spec I gave out was only what I was offered, with my addition
of a 20Gb HD for the OS.  I like Stuart's idea of a removable USB drive so
may look at that for a future upgrade.

What is SSH and why would that help me do the Admin?

AV software would be for the PC only - I have noted that Linux is being
gradually targetted more and more by viruses etc.  Again I have Norton on my
windows partition so just duplicating that.

The VPN client is indeed a way I will be truying to go forward but will need
help on this too later - mainly because I think at the moment the distro is
going to be Ubuntu.  Anyone any reasons why not to?

As for the SMTP server I'll put that on the back burner too until I get the
initial server sorted.

Ian

-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Parkington [mailto:mrsparks_maillists at yahoo.com]
Sent: 21 October 2006 11:37
To: ianpascoe at btinternet.com
Cc: Malvern at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Malvern] Recommendations for File Servers


Hi Ian,

Your planned file server project sounds very similar to the what I've
done for my home network. I don't know if you'll find it useful but this
is what I've done. It has been an ongoing project (and learning
experience) for about 3 years, so some of the hardware and software is
now a little dated, but still works a treat!

For hardware I acquired a pair of old PII (600MHz 128MB) Small Form
Factor Compaq Deskpro's from Ebay for about £30. I used these chassis
because from prior experience I knew I could use them 'headless'. I did
in fact find out I had to download a ROMPAQ from the web to stop the
machine hanging on reboots (they waited for a keypress by default). I'd
definitely recommend these machine (I'd pick a faster processor today
though!) because they are small, very quiet and are widely available
secondhand.

The first machine I use as a firewall. I installed a couple of extra
NICs and use Smoothwall Express (http://www.smoothwall.org/) for the OS.
This gives me both an internal network and a DMZ (which to be honest is
seldom used!). Smoothwall I can't recommend highly enough. I love
software that 'just works' and Smoothwall does. The documentation is
good and the support forums (when I've needed them) active and friendly.
It has both a browser based and command line (SSH) management interface.
It also automatically checks for updates.

The second machine is my 'server'. The base OS is Mandrake 10.1CE, which
was my distro of choice at the time. If I was to rebuild I'd probably
user Ubuntu Server 6.10, which would provide all the Ubuntu (Debian)
goodness but without the overhead of a GUI.

For file storage, I installed an additional USB2 PCI card and hung two
250GB USB drives off the back. One is my data drive which I back up (via
  an Rsync cron job each night) to the other drive. I purposefully used
external USB drives so I could easily move them to a new box should I
need to. The drives I formatted to EXT3 and they get mounted at boot
time via additional lines I manually added to fstab.

The only AV I run is F-Prot
(http://www.f-prot.com/download/home_user/download_fplinux.html). This I
both update and run scans nightly with another cron job. Seems to do the
job! I also played with ClamAV at one point, which seemed ok.

I run Samba to share files to my works Windows laptop and NFS for
everything else.

It also runs Apache and mySQL which publishes several little web apps
that I use, Wiki, Gallery and TorrentFlux (http://www.torrentflux.com/)
which makes a great torrent client for an always on fileserver.

I run it all headless and manage via either SSH or Webmin. I love Webmin
- again software that just works! I've manged for find Webmin modules
for everything I've needed to date. It also acts as my print server,
using CUPS, to both Windows and Linux machines.

Together with my desktop machine and an old wireless access point they
are both wired via a little 100MB switch. I then access the lot
wirelessly from my laptop via HTTP, NFS or Samba. Using SSH certificate
login and rsync I can also backup my laptop data (including Windows via
Cygwin) to the file server.

I used to run a mail server, but it proved too much admin for home use.
I now just use Thunderbird (with various extensions to access web based
email accounts) and backup my Thunderbird profile up to the server
(again with SSH and Rsync).

That's just about it I guess. Sorry for waffling on so much. Hope some
of it was useful.

Regards
Stuart

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Linux #423936  Ubuntu #4500
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