Building a Stout, Versatile Linux Small Business Server
Don't Cheap Out on Hardware
Carla Schroder
Friday, October 17, 2008 12:30:36 PM
My friends call me a bore on the subject of careful hardware shopping,
but then they go out and buy some dumb widget because it has a low price
tag, and then they waste all kinds of time trying to make the thing work,
and then bore everyone with complaints. The math is simple — what costs
less, hours of your time, or a few dollars more for something that works
right and doesn't drive you crazy? The Internet is chock-full of user
reviews, so you don't have to shop blindly. If a device does not have good
Linux support, don't buy it. The more users and devices under your care,
the more important it is to invest in quality gear. Downtime, service
interruptions, and nurse-maiding cheapo hardware get expensive quickly.
On the other hand, you don't have to pay too much. x86 hardware gives
you so much bang for your buck that you don't need specialized, expensive
gear for most networking jobs. Sure, your local friendly Cisco-certified
person will probably scoff at your Linux-powered router on inexpensive
hardware. Let her scoff, for you are saving a ton of money, getting great
performance, and using your standard familiar Linux commands. You know
there are no secret vendor backdoors (known to every cracker in the world
but not you), and that bugs and security flaws will not be swept under the
rug.
Getting Started
There are three tools that I think are essential for a network
administrator: a good bootable rescue CD, a good bootable rescue USB stick,
and a special network administrator's laptop. I prefer SystemRescueCD because I have
yet to find an important feature that it doesn't support. You get all the
usual important networking and system administration tools, plus it also
supports LVM and RAID . A laptop
equipped with a serial terminal, at least one wired and one wireless
network interface, and all the software utilities you might ever need is a
great timesaver, and keeps your blood pressure at healthy levels. It
doesn't have to be a super high-powered machine with all the bells and
whistles; anything that supports current Linux kernels and is easy to carry
around does the job just fine. Stick with Atheros-based wireless interfaces
because these support all wireless modes, including management and
monitoring. Most of the others only support client functions. The serial
terminal is your life-saver when Ethernet goes south, which it will, and
it's necessary for embedded boards and headless servers. See The
Serial Console: A Front Door Worth Leaving Open to learn how to set it
up. Most laptops these days don't have a serial port, but no problem--a
USB-to-serial connector is inexpensive and works beautifully. Just plug it
in and then run dmesg to see its name, which is usually
ttyUSB0.
Come back for our next installment, in which we will make
sure our Internet gateway is stout and well-secured, and then set up
lightweight, reliable intrusion detection that is actually easy to
administer, and won't make you crazy with false alarms and endless log
analysis and all those other bad things that ID systems are famous for.
Resources
Article courtesy of Enterprise Networking Planet, originally published April 28, 2008
Carla Schroder is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the newly-released Linux Networking Cookbook.
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