[SC.LUG] Ubuntu help needed

[George]

Marroc Danderfluff wrote:
 > Can someone help me?
 >
 > I have installed Ubuntu server edition and want to set it up in several
 > ways:
 > - Backups to external USB hard drives

When I tried this in the past I found that the way USB drives are 
handled wasn't ideal. What you generally want with backups is to have a 
mount point, say /mnt/backup and have your cron scripts setup to point 
at that location each night. By default in many distributions the USB 
device names change depending on the order in which the devices are 
detected so it's possible to get a drive other than the one you expected 
at your mount point. You can fix this now by specifying that a certain 
drive (by serial) is connected at a certain mount point but it's still a 
fiddly process. Additionally I've also had problems with the power 
management in USB drives being less supported in Linux than Windows. 
eSATA would probably not suffer from these issues.

One of the recommended bits of backup software on Linux is 
http://www.bacula.org however it's not something I've tried myself. I 
personally use an Rsync script from http://folk.uio.no/johnen/bontmia/ 
to backup my systems.

As someone else has mentioned if you want to do backup "seriously" then 
tape is still recommended.

 > - Apache/PHP Document Management System with https on the Internet for
 > authenticated users

What do you mean by Document Management? There are a number of Document 
Management systems out there (Alfresco and Knowledgetree to name two) 
but they're probably too "Enterprise" for what you need.

 > What I need is to pay someone for a 'quick start'. I'm not even sure if
 > Gnome or KDE are installed. It isn't clear from the Ubuntu Server Guide.

The best way to learn all these things is by doing - maybe getting a 
good deadtree book and working through it. If you want to know where to 
aim your efforts the VMWare site has a number of pre-setup images with 
various applications installed that you can download and try.

 > So far, I've managed to sudo and shut-down. Tonight I'm going to set up
 > eth0 so that I can access my LAN and the Internet. I have to admit that
 > I'm terrified of iptables though. It seems complicated even though I
 > have a fairly good knowledge of TCP/IP.

If you are behind a NAT'd router then I don't think you should need to 
touch IP Tables. If you're not behind a router and are intending to put 
the machine direct on the internet then you should consider not doing 
and instead using a separate machine running Smoothwall or similar. 
Learning about IPTables is "interesting" but there's little reason not 
to use a prebuilt firewall system now, especially if you want more 
complex system such as a DMZ and Traffic Shapeing.

George