Another whacked plan

[elfs]

I own an IP address. This isn't unusual in and of itself. The bandwidth is pretty small, but it's tolerable; I have easily pumped a gigabyte a day through it without a problem, and my ISP is tolerant of people running servers on their system.

In my closet, as I speak, is Kouryou-chan's own computer. It's a dinky little thing, a P2/233 with 64MB of memory. So, here's the stupid thought of the day: Is there any reason I couldn't run, say, pendorwright.com out of my closet?

Here's what I'm thinking: I'll put a third NIC into the firewall box and configure a completely independent subnet for it, and route all outside traffic heading for port 80 to the subnet on that third NIC, the DMZ. Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

I'm a little itchy about publicizing my IP address, although it's not a state secret or anything like that. And my firewall's been pretty robust. I just worry about compromised traffic; I'd have to firewall off the rest of world from the DMZ box, and control access to the DMZ, and while I'm a pretty damned fine system administrator, there's only one of me and a whole bunch of black hats out there.

Comments

[wyrdone.livejournal.com]

Should work fine. Check out OpenBSD and PF if you haven't lately.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

No reason atall you couldn't do that. In fact, if you have the power, I'll *give* you a P133 with 96mb and a 6GB IDE HDD to do it with... and there are other IDE HDD's around if you need'em. (It was until a couple of months ago *my* mail server.)

BTW, 2Alpha will do custom firewalling for you at the border router should you decide to switch. They're cool that way.

[elfric.livejournal.com]

Thats pretty much what I've done since '96 or so - run all my domains from my own servers. I run my own DNS, mail, web, everything. It's all off a linux server and DSL.

It's easier than you think =)

As for firewalling, etc, that's a different issue and one that I happily let Linux handle, too. If you're paranoid about that, though, then you might look into different options.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Second that.... if you're paranoid about it, OpenBSD is one system the skript kiddies are almost guaranteed not to have a rootkit for... you already know FreeBSD, so you're half-way home... actually, most of Open's security stuff (pf, etc.) already runs on Free, so you could just go with what you know... a basic Free install is about 69mb. Teeny. Small enough that downloading it over decent dialup is doable (he says from experience). And pf is really sweet as far as configuration goes. The only reason I don't run it for my own firewall is I hate the whole "compile the world" paradigm that the BSDs get into.

Suunds reasonable...

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

*.pele.cx and www.evolutionwriters.com sit on my desk at home. I actually thought about offering you server space, but until I change providers I only have 384K upstream and I doubt that would be enough.

[fallenpegasus]

I have a machine I was about to take to RePC that I could give to you. Put a HD into it, and it could be your outside world box.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I appreciate that, but as I wrote typo'd, I have Kouryou-chan's old computer here. All it needs is a hard drive, too, and I've got four of those. I should probably buy a monitor for them and stick them in the utility room, when I find the room and after tygereclipse gets her own apartment, which she seems to be lining up for next month.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I used to be very proud of the fact that I ran my own server, live on the internet, with built-in firewalling, and used it to run all my DNS domains, web sites, and so on. Sure it's easy... I ain't no slacker (http://www.everythingsysadmin.com).

However now I'm older and wiser and I'm much more proud of the fact that I let someone else do all that bullshit. I just upload files and let them do all the work. For $9.99/month, I'd be stupid not to.

news server

[happy-hacker.livejournal.com]

I would highly recommend dnews (http://netwinsite.com/dnews.htm) for your news server. Yes, it's not free, a single user license is 95 dollars, and it's worth every penny. They're good folks, and you can configure a suck fed news server in about 10 minutes from when you finish uncompressing it. Your article (from lo these many years ago) on the balkanization of usenet predicted exactly this kind of model, where you suck down what you want and aggregate it into the feed YOU want.

-HH

Re: news server

[happy-hacker.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, Forgot to mention I also highly recommend postfix for a mailer instead of sendmail. Much easier to admin, and it has a better security reputation.

-HH

Re: news server

[ladyerin.livejournal.com]

sendmail is evil ;-) been running a postfix and apache server from under my desk for nearly a year...no problems yet *knocks on wood*. postfix was a 5 minute set up, simple and quick.

Devil's Advocate

[(Anonymous)]

Forgive the Catholic title, but I only see one person really saying "don't do it."

So...

"Is there any reason I couldn't run, say, pendorwright.com out of my closet?"

Yes, there is. In a word, "bandwidth".

Granted, Elf, I have no idea how much traffic The Journal Entries receive; but from your descriptions of your use of Usenet, I have to assume your home bandwidth requirements are substantial. Including the additional traffic a webserver would consume would likely leave you searching for a faster pipe.

...And once you'd found that faster pipe, it would once again become clogged from serving pages (and sucking down alt.binaries.*, and BitTorrent, etc.) -- quite the vicious circle.

There are also the issues of hardware reliability, OS and software patches and security that would rob you of what little free time you have. I fear that running a server from your closet would only turn into a headache. (Not that those factors have stopped me from considering exactly the same thing, but do note that I haven't done it yet!)

So, anyway, I'm just thinking out loud (so to speak) here. Figured I'd give voice to the other side of things. I'm curious to see how this all turns out.

Bryan.

Re: Devil's Advocate

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't think the bandwidth is really an issue. The Journal Entries use 1.5GB of bandwidth a month. I can suck down that much traffic in a couple of hours, and my regular use is actually much more modest than my ocassional bursts of usenet heaviness.

I do worry about the security, though. That's my biggest scare.