[luau] computer set-up advice

[Warren Togami]

On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 15:08, Rodney Kanno wrote:
> 
> Computer 1: Pentium 200MHZ 128MB Ram HD ?? (gotta buy)
> OS: Linux Mandrake 8.2
> Services: Webserver, IP Masquerading, Firewall, Squirrelmail
> 
> Computer 2: Athlon 700MHZ 256MB Ram
> OS: Linux Mandrake 8.2/win4lin, Windows 98
> Services: Video capture/editing, graphics, sound capture/editing, surfing
> the web, etc...
> 
> Computer 3: possibly
> OS: Windows 95
> 
> I guess my main question is, Is computer 1 powerful enough to provide those
> services? If so, is this reasonably easy to set-up? Will the files on
> computer 1 be accessible from computers 2 & 3?

Yes Computer 1 can handle it because it has a sufficient amount of RAM,
as long as you can manage to get two decent PCI NIC's to work in there
(that may be a challenge on many older motherboards).  ISA NIC's will
work but they will severely slow down your RoadRunner connectivity. 
I've seen ISA NIC's max out at data rates lower than even DSL.  Go with
PCI if possible.

It would be reasonably easy to setup and once properly secured with
iptables and tcp wrapper rules it should be safe to run everything
except services accessible from the outside.  For outside accessible
services you may consider installing mandatory access controls or
perhaps the vserver tool to isolate that service from the rest of the
machine.  That means that if that service gets cracked the rest of the
machine will not be cracked.

It took quite a bit of work to get vservers running on the videl server,
but the long term benefits are tremendous.  It is also very good because
there is no additional memory overhead for each virtual server
partition... meaning no performance difference.  I really like that we
used Red Hat with vserver, because we can use up2date normally to patch
the vserver partitions.  The only drawback is increased hard drive space
requirements.

Yes computer 2 and 3 will be able to reach files there, and you will
have several methods to share files on your local network.

I would recommend using 100% SFTP or SCP for maximum security purposes,
but data rate can be slow due to the encryption cypher.  Samba is the
next logical choice especially for Computer 3, although Linux can mount
Samba shares too.  Then there's stuff like AFS, Coda or Intermezzo
network filesystems.  Those are fairly difficult to configure but they
work very well, and AFS is available for Windows.

Only as a VERY LAST RESORT use NFS Linux to Linux file sharing.  NFS is
very insecure compared to the other options.