At home I've a fileserver PC and Ubuntu clients including one that's ended up needing to be left on 24/7. I'm thinking of moving the server's 2 disks to the always-on desktop box to save electricity. All PCs are on a wifi ADSL router using Cat5 and WPA, and we've an (untrusted) lodger. Backups are nightly between encrypted server disks, and approx weekly an incremental to an unencrypted USB drive which is locked away. [*]
Have I thought of all the pros and cons, and how should I secure this arrangement (especially NFS)? Power: saves 25% same disk count, one less mobo LAN security: no change - is it enough? client login passwords; static client IPs; NFS exports to individual IPs; encrypted data disks; ssh with passwords Physical security: worse. fileserver is in the loft, PC and router are on the desk Noise: OK desktop gets 3 quiet Barracuda disks Speed: got a PCI-IDE card so each disk can be on its own channel Future expansion: costly will need to replace with larger disks. 2 channel PCI card => only add 1 more disk Stability: not sure. The 24/7 desktop has mostly run between power cuts so far. Apps are installed as needed mostly from universe and there's a spare PC for reboots e.g. learning grub2. Browser memory leaks eventually fill swap and fell the box: the browser could be run in a VM to avoid this. Bring on the advice please! Anthony * story in a nutshell; some features not yet implemented quite like that. -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------