Servers and Whatnot

So I’ve been on a little fun into setting up a webserver. Using an old computer which uses a shuttle case + motherboard. This case and motherboard has been through a lot. Stuff taken in and out loads.

And the fan failing. That was fun. It kept overheating and after much playing around, we found that the fan on the cpu heatsink had died. Shuttle being nice and kind when they designed this heatsink, made a size fan that you can’t get anywhere. Instead, I got a generic case fan and duct taped it to the heatsink! Clever, eh?

So my server. What is it serving? Well, it’s backup server. Thanks to the backuppc package, all the computers will be backed up in my house. Every week a full backup is done. Followed up by a incremental backup each day. Backuppc is also very clever. If there are files that are the same across backups and computers, the file will only be stored once. I can’t backup my whole house yet though. This is because of the hard drive in the server. It’s only a 120GB one. That means I’m currently only backing up one computer as a test.

What else is my server serving? SSH. The first thing I did when I set up the server was install SSH. This is for two reasons. The server is now on top of a shelf somewhere else in the house with only power and an ethernet cable attached. SSH is my means of remote access. The other reason is so I can have a nice SSH tunnel when I go to sixthform in September. No more annoying school filters to me Another part of my SSH server is a key based authentication. I decided that I didn’t really want to put my server out on the internet, if someone was able to bruteforce the password. Therefore, I have set up key based authentication and completely turned off Password authentication.

Quotas. I also managed to set these up. Just as a play around really. It was pretty simple to do:

1. sudo apt-get install quota
2. Open up fstab and pop in the usrquota option to the partitions that need to be quotaised
3. Restart
4. sudo edquota -u username
5. The quota config for that user will show up. Under the blocks and inodes column, you are able to see what the current use of that user is.
6. You are then able to edit the number of blocks (1,000 blocks = about 1MB) that the user can make under the first hard and soft columns.
7. The second quotaing is the number of files which can be set under the second hard and soft columns
8. Save and quit. You’re set!

What’s the difference between hard and soft quotaing you ask? From what I’ve read around the internet, a soft quota is one that limits the user slightly. The user is allowed to go over the soft quota. But only for a limited time, before they have to delete the files. The hard quota is a strict quota. You hit that quota, and that’s it. Delete the file or be able to do nothing!

And of course, to do my bit, my server is folding proteins. Slowly but surely…