Replacing The Fedora Server
From Mike Beane's Blog
Old Server
I've been running a Fedora Core server in the attic for years (just checked the version: FC7) and decided that it was time to move things over to a newer distro. Before the FC install, it was Mandrake (pre-Mandriva), and this time it will be an Ubuntu 10.10 server install.
I'm debating if it will stay in the 'new' box or if I'll attempt to migrate the drives to the pictured chassis. More drive space in the new box as their is only one IDE connector on the old box's mainboard. I'm losing speed in this move, but I'm gaining potential storage space.
- old box: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz - cpu MHz: 2399.451
- new box: AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2500+ - cpu MHz: 1833.180
New Server
Users & Home Directories
Found an excellent article on line on restricting SFTP users to their home directories and implemented that. I've been wanting to do that for ages and never got around to doing it.
Remote Desktop
I'm a fan of SSH-ing back to my home server and utilizing a desktop there when I'm away from home. I find it an easy way to provide privacy, ease of use, having all my tools there, etc. After installing Ubuntu Server, I did a sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop and waited for the desktop core elements to be installed. After that, a VNCSERVER setup and then SSH over Putty from my Windows box shows a working remote desktop on the server. Difference in RAM usage was roughly 128MB+. I started doing this back in 2006 and you can read VNC over SSH for more on that.
Everything is in the cloud, but I like my local copy (especially for those emails that I've accidentally deleted from Gmail and sometimes I like some extra added spam sifting. I've set up the new box to pull from various external mailboxes into my primary local account (see Dealing with Spam for more details on that) and it is working well right now.
Torrents
I've been a fan of the apparently defunct www.torrentflux.com Torrentflux project for ease of use and features that I want. That's up and running.
To Do
- Set up Samba shares for internal use
- Determine what to do with the old server
- Put more drives in the new box
- Put in dedicated nic cards in the new box (one for web, one for squid)
- Migrate data from the old server to the new one
- Look for some more memory for the new box