Re: Internet appliance?
From: Steve Ackman (steve_at_SNIP-THIS.twoloonscoffee.com)
Date: 09/19/05
- Previous message: Mark Hobley: "Compiling Debian packages for Intel Pentium processor"
- In reply to: Gordon S. Hlavenka: "Internet appliance?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 00:21:43 GMT
In <8V6Xe.1869$D42.201@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com>, Gordon S. Hlavenka wrote:
> What would be a good starting point for turning a sub-GHz PC into an
> internet appliance? I'd like to host a couple of low-traffic websites,
> distribute incoming mail, and provide router, firewall, proxy, and
> shared storage for Win/Mac/linux clients.
>
> First priority would be security, then stability, followed closely by
> ease of configuration and maintenance. I'd rate my own skill level as
> extremely HW-savvy but a *ix-newbie.
My "starting point" wouldn't be Linux for that,
but FreeBSD.
Stability: Look at the longest uptimes on netcraft.com
By far, the majority are BSD's. Not a single Linux in
the top 50 (at 2005-09-18-19:00 EDT anyway).
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Security: Your machine e-mails you every day with
system status, which includes several security data.
If you want to, you can update whatever is out of date
every night with a cron job that does cvsup and
portupgrade. In that case, your system is never more
than 24 hours from "current."
Maintenance: Uh... I guess I covered that in
security. In addition to the ports, there are
also pkg commands: pkg_fetch, pkg_add, pkg_delete,
etc.
Ease of Configuration: Well, FreeBSD may not have
some of the GUI tools that some of the Linux distros
have, so initially may not seem so newbie friendly as
far as setup and configuration goes, but mostly stuff
"just works."
For those things that don't "just work" there's the
HANDBOOK, which is something no Linux Distro has.
99% of your questions will be answered there...
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html
(or /usr/share/doc/en/books/handbook/) if they're not
already answered in
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/index.html
(or /usr/share/doc/en/books/faq/)
BTW, as far as Linux goes, I also have a Xandros
3.01 machine for my wife, a Red Hat 6.2 machine for
some backward compatibility on an outdated camera,
and a Debian 3.1 machine for just messin' around.
The FreeBSD box is the slowest (750Mhz), yet is the
one I prefer to spend almost all my time on... It runs
servers and desktop.
- Previous message: Mark Hobley: "Compiling Debian packages for Intel Pentium processor"
- In reply to: Gordon S. Hlavenka: "Internet appliance?"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
Relevant Pages
|
|
