[muglo] Linux
- From: "Eric D" <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 23:39:25 -0400
Well, I've been playing with Yellow Dog Linux (www.yellowdoglinux.com) on a
Beige G3/266, 128 MB of RAM & 80 GB drive (total cost $240, $100 of which
the 80 GB drive! ... & a fraction of the price with lots more HD space than
a B&W advertised not too long ago... ;-).
It's a phenomenal server (stable so far) at very low cost and not hard to
set up! (and the software is free)
Once you have it installed (you could safely do a server-only install, i.e.
no GUI) all you need to do is install WebMin from the command line (requires
you to FTP the file to your computer from the command line... easy to do if
you've ever used a command-line based ftp) (www.webmin.com ... also
available for Mac OS X... it's an app that controls a whole slew of features
of a *nix box). Installing Linux is as easy as installing OS X for an
experienced Mac OS X user. To set up the machine for use as a network
server, you must understand the concepts of partitioning, users & passwords,
logging into a unix console.
Once WebMin is installed and you've connected the computer to a DHCP server,
you *never* will have to touch the computer physically (except to install a
major OS upgrade). Just log into WebMin with a web browser and you can
control all important network/server-related features. You can turn
on/off/configure Samba and AppleTalk file sharing with the click of a
button, modify the Apache web server to your heart's content and fiddle with
more advanced server features (like running your own mail server)...
discovered that it does AFP (is it AFP?... anyway, Apple File Sharing over
TCP/IP)... this means that you can run a file server accessible by any Mac
user over the net (OS 9 and X). All I had to do was click the "on" button
and it was running nicely.
Plus, one bonus... browsing the web is _extremely_ fast on Linux. This 266
MHz machine feels faster on most pages than my 400 MHz PowerBook (&
infinitely faster than OS 9 :-^)... drawback of course is relatively little
proprietary software support (e.g. Flash, Windows Media Player, QuickTime...
there are substitutes for WMP & QT but they're not quite as integrated as on
Mac or Windows yet).
PS Obviously this isn't for the computer user who can't trouble-shoot
internet problems but it's not something that requires years of
apprenticeship anymore!
PSS The one thing that running this server has shown me (more like the
access logs for ssh) is that there are a *lot* of people out there trying to
hack systems. If you're running a remotely insecure server/computer (like
Windows), it better be behind a firewall (also, don't use first names and
first names as passwords... the automated hacker tools that were trying to
break in seemed ot be using first names and first name passwords or simple
words like pass or password in their login attempts (like George)...
especially make sure that your "root" password is something secure!
Anyhow, that's it for now.
Eric.
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