Re: Multiple PC's for one user?
<posted & mailed>
OK, Bart, Andreas, and Paul,
Let me start by saying "thanks for replying." Needing more detail on the
question seems to be a common need.
My major uses are email and web, but I want to learn some shell scripting,
and do some python programming. One way I love to use the web is to suck
down whole books at a time using httrack. I began thinking that if I put
all these html-ized books on a server, say running thttpd or something, I
could also run a cgi search script, I would be able to have a intranet with
customized content and a search engine that worked only for me. So, I
would like to set up a box and start it out as a web server (intranet
style.) I'm thinking of making this the "heavy box" that does a lot of
daemon stuff. So I think, I could put exim here, and cron at atd, and then
take them off my desktop system. (actually, I use retchmail, cron, popfile,
and exim all in tandem to get my mail.) I also envision myself running any
compiles on the heavy box, while just running some stupid games on my
desktop.
So, what I really wonder first about the email is this, I know from Cron,
and At, that these detached jobs expect to be able to email you any errors.
If I yank exim off my desktop box, and run something detached, how can I
set it up so any error report will try to go over another box on the
192.168.0.* network? Also on email, would it make sense to
ssh-or-telnet-or-remote-X onto the heavy box for the email work? Or would
it be better to download it and do email on the light box? I'm really
hoping that there is some setting in the /etc directory that can just allow
me to say "use the smtp at 192.168.0.1" but I am not sure. A lot seems to
lean on that concept.
I also wonder about telnet, I know that telnet sends passwords "in the open"
so it is bad to use it online, but is it still considered safe for a
home-based network?
Also, I am a dial up user only considering DSL. If I went DSL, I would buy
a firewall plus switch, but if I stay with dial-up, I might consider a
seperate k6 or P-one box running ip-masq as a firewall.
Of course, there is the background worry that some application I try out
down the road really expect cron or exim on the local machine, and won't
work right without it.
Bart van den Heuvel wrote:
> I guess this is all up to you...
>
> The debian systems I use all more or less depend on each other. I've got
> one DB instance, One SMTP mail instance, One IMAP mail instance,
> gameservers, One central system that runs Cron over the network. These
> services are all shared/used by other machines over the network.
>
> Distributed shared services is a major strength of linux (and debian).
>
> The other way around is also possible, have a single machine that services
> the needs of many... For instance a multiuser system that has six screens,
> six keyboards, six mice: http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html
>
> So tell us what you expect from the two systems and we might be able to
> tell you how the services can be split up.
>
> Gr,
>
> Bart
>
>> Instead of buying a commercian "muscle box" I think it would be more
> fun to instead link two pc's to serve one user, namely, myself.
> Thinking about this, I wanted to contact the group.
>>
>> Has anybody else done this? I would like to know so I could just
> follow in the footsteps of somebody who has experience.
>>
>> I would really like to have the repetitive and daemon like jobs run on
> the computer without the keyboard/screen/mouse. I wonder though
> because in debian exim and cron are in the "base system." Can a
> Debian system be run without these? Email in particular, is there a
> setting where I can tell the "lighter" system to use the SMTP server
> of the "heavier" system as a default, or do I need to run a lighter
> SMTP daemon or do I need to program exim for this somehow?
>>
>> Can simpler and less secure things like telnet be configured to work
> only within the LAN? I know how to invoke SSH but is seems overkill
> for logging into a box next to the "lighter" box. any thoughts?
>> Thanks,
>> ---
>> Scotty
>>
>>
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