Re: Servers as appliances

[Michael A Hamblin <michaelh@utdallas.edu>]

On Sat, 22 May 1999, Tonnesen Steve wrote:

> My goal is to have a server setup that can be used like an appliance.  The
> box is popped into the school, and is all set up and ready to go.  No need
> for the teachers in a school to start mucking around with setting up
> shares for the administration software, library software, home
> directories, etc.  Not to mention security auditing, status monitoring,
> data backups and all that other important but oh-so-boring stuff.
> 
> Is this feasible?  Is it possible to come up with a single server setup
> (or even a limited number of configurations, like elementary/secondary)
> that could satisfy the needs of the teachers in all schools? 

The biggest problem I see is for a medium to large sized school, services
will have to be broke up onto other machines to handle the load. For
instance a machine for each of these basic serving operations:

Authentication server
bootp/dchp server
Web server
NFS/SAMBA
IMAP/POP and SMTP
Print server
Firewall
Web proxy/cache/filter
IP Masqerader (when there aren't many free IPs)

How I could see doing this to make it as functional as possible: (I speak
RedHat so I'll just talk in terms of it for a bit here :)

Create a kickstart installer in RedHat Linux which brings up options to
install each of the above setups, including a generic workstation
configuration or two. This gives you the advantages of doing your own
distribution (make the setup more generalized, easier to follow) without
all the disadvantages (having to maintain yet another distro :)

That way if I'm running a small school of about forty children I can
install all the services on one box, no problem. If I'm running a huge
school I can split up the services easily. And if I'm running a medium
school I can mix and match services to what machines I have available,
like do authentication, dhcp, and file services from one machine, have
mail services on another and so on. If it's done right, I think it'll work
great.

Little plug for Cyrus IMAP... if possible I'd go IMAP. The IMAP protocol
is flexible enough so that an IMAP server can also talk POP with POP email
clients should the need arise. So a user can decide to use IMAP or if
their favorite email client is POP only, they can use it instead. Also one
of the complaints against IMAP is it's "insecurity", which isn't due to a
problem with the protocol but the server software. Univ. of Washington's
IMAP server is less secure than Cyrus's IMAP server and is not as
flexible. Most of the complaints about security of IMAP are better
directed at Univ. Wash's IMAP server.

--
Michael Hamblin            http://www.utdallas.edu/~michaelh/
michaelh@utdallas.edu      http://www.ductape.net/
UTD Linux User Group       Engineering and Computer Science Support x2997