Re: Multiple PC's for one user?
On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 09:52:18PM -0500, Scott Fitzgerald wrote:
> <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?
There is also telnet-ssl package in Debian. If all your computers are at home
and you have a firewalled link to the internet, I doubt that you have any
need to worry about someone outside sniffing your passwords. Just don't put
a Windoze box on your LAN. It might have a special M$ feature that sniffs
passwords and sells them to someone in Dubai.
>
> 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.
My D-Link modem is, I think, an embedded Linux system. It does NAT which is
another name for ip-masq.
> 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.
>
I think Debian, and good sysadmin policy, requires exim or some such on each
machine. Lots of sysadmin stuff sends email to root to report to a real person
when it gets into trouble. Don't try to break it.
Your project will to require lots of hard disk, but not much CPU power. With
only one user there is really not much for it to do. I think putting separate
functions on separate boxes should be driven not by fear of bad people breaking
in, but by concern about you, a mere human, making mistakes, and secondly a
concern about equipment breakdown.
You intend that your system will not be stable. You want to try different
things. That's unstable. Organize you system so that if the cat walks across
your keyboard while your in the bathroom, you have a way to recover. Beyond
that try different things. Its fun. I don't think there is a single right
way to do what you want to do.
And remember, all the software is free (as in beer as well as in freedom). If
you have enough boxes to keep things separate, you will surely have enough
compute power to run things like exim on boxes where it is not 'needed'. Is
it really 'better' to have the kernel in a wait-loop instead of checking for
email that never comes?
> 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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--
Paul E Condon
pecondon@mesanetworks.net
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