~~~~~~Intro~~~~~~
This is probably going to be my first whacky review. You also might be a bit surprised that I am reviewing such an old product too. No, I'm not going to say that this is a must have buy for all your computing needs, but recently several of these boxes came my way for only two hundred pounds and I decided to share some of my experiences and say why these machines are actually very interesting.
The focus of this review is going to be on using these as appliance servers.
~~~~~~Uses~~~~~~
This is an old and crummy
PC right? Yes, but it is an old crummy PC that can run good
Linux server based OSes and do a whole host of tasks. You could have one
dedicated server running everything, or you could use independent
ones - lots of these little boxes. Since schools and other insitutions have these lying around, you can get them very cheaply. And the specs are certainly good enough to do these tasks:
a) Become a
networkfirewall to protect your
home computers on the internet with advanced
intrusion detection and stateful packet inspection.
b) Work as a
web server.
c) work as a mail server.
d) FTP server
The only thing to note is that the machines I am working with have had their HDs upgraded to 10GB and the memory has been expanded to 512MB SDRAM.
~~~~~~Network firewall setup~~~~~~
My choice of firewall device is smoothwall linux. I don't actually use it personally, but I have set it up and I think it is an easy system to use and monitor.
Download the latest smoothwall release from www.smoothwall.org and burn a CDRom from the iso image you download.
Make a pair of boot floppies from the dosutils folder on the smoothwall CD.
Boot the old machine, now to be called 'smoothie' with the first floppy and follow the instructions, put the second floppy in place of the first one when told to, press return, insert the cdrom you made earlier when told to, answer all the questions as they are asked.
Before you get stuck, download all the docs from the Docs section of www.smoothwall.org and read them. Twice.
now read them again until you understand them.
When you have finished the installation, you have made yourself a firewall/
router for nowt.
Reboot smoothie and set the bios for no floppy drive, manually set the hard drive details in the BIOS and disable everything on the board that you are not going to need for smoothie, like the com ports, the parralel port and any USB ports you may have. Disable any onboard sound and/or modems.
If you are using dialup, you will be better off with an
external modem. In that case you will want to keep one of the
serial ports running. This will save embarrasment later.
Power smoothie down and remove the floppy drive, the cdrom drive, the
keyboard, mouse which you never needed anyway and the monitor.
Connect the cable from the
Modem/
ADSL modem/cable box into the red interface on smoothie and the cable from the green interface on smoothie to a
hub or switch, connect the other PCs to the hub/switch and off you go, power smoothie up for a shared routed broadband connection with a firewall and an inbuilt web proxy.
All administered from the
web browser on either PC. With alittle more reading and another
network card, you can have a DMZ with space for a webserver or mail server or both too!
Yes I know XP has an inbuilt firewall, the expression chocolate fireguard comes to mind, when considering the effectiveness of this firewall from XP.
Whether you have a hardware firewall or a software router/firewall, you do not use it for anything else. Not for a print server. Nor for trying to run SETI@home on. Everything else you run on the box will introduce possible weaknesses into the firewall.
How does the router work? Just like any other router, stuff comes in from the LAN and gets routed to the internet in your case, stuff comes back from the internet addressed to the IP address of the router and the router ROUTES it to the PC that requested it in the first place. If the router has no record of a packet being requested, it dumps it.
YAY! YAY! You have now secured your home network from external intrusion. This won't stop malware from getting out instantly without further configuration of the rules via the web interface, but this is still a very good start.
The other thing is, that this is so easy to install. Literally, the best advice is to just read the manual and follow the instructions during the installation carefully. It's as simple as that.
~~~~~~WebServer setup + FTP server~~~~~~
My first choice is generally always with Debian for server boxes. The apt-get software installation and fetching tool is the most impressive on the planet and makes the installation of almost any bit of linux software possible with a minimum of problems. So, which Debian should we choose?
For most people, debian proper is too daunting, so I recommend LAMPPIX. This is a relatively new Debian/Knoppix variant that comes preconfigured and setup as a web server utility box. Since it is a knoppix variant, it also comes with amazing hardware detection and setup, as well as being able to boot from CD. You just pop the CD in, and boot up from it. This is the first problem - your appliance box needs to be able to boot from CD as a selectable option in the BIOS. If you are a geek, you will be able to boot from the CD via a
floppy disk, so be warned that as with the firewall, you need to be able to boot from CD before buying anything.
Using your current computer, download LAMPPIX, verify its md5sum and burn to disc. Then boot up from it.
Cool! It should shortly drop you into a light GUI called XFCE. Since we want a permanent machine, use the tool to install to hard
disk. It will be available in the menu with the picture of a box of tools. Just follow the instructions and it will all be fine. The worst bit is having to partition the hardisk with the text partition creation tool. So, if you are not in a geeky mood, don't bother. If you want to proceed, select the current HD and delete all partitions on it using delete. Then create one partition of 512MB and make it type 'Linux swap' as one of the
options on the long list.
Then make the rest of the drive a partition of type Linux native'. Then select write and write it to disk. Then you will have to format the drive with ext3 which will be the next available action on a dialog that will appear.
Don't choose the others since they do not work yet. After this stage, just click and acknowledge whatever it asks. It will now copy the CD and it's applications to HD and will install the boot manager to boot it up.
OK, so reboot and all will be finished and you should be launched into a nice
desktop. At this stage you must setup your
LAN card with the provided tool (in the box of tools menu ).
If all is well, then you should be able to surf the internet from it and contact it from other machines. You should also go into the command line and do su root
Enter password lamppix, and then launch /opt/lampp/lampp security and set all the passwords to safer ones.
Well done! You should now have a fully working web server with PHP, PERL, Mysql, proftpd
ftp server, and apache 2.0 with
SSL support. Openssh is also packaged which is a good choice over ftp becuase it can manage sftp which is secured.
Before you unplug your monitor permanently, I recommend going into the terminal and typing apt-get update. Then apt-get install xvncserver, answer yes to all questions, and then run xvncserver. Enter in a password. This is so that you can connect to the machine remotely via the vnc protocol which is multiplatform and clients work on Mac, PC, Linux, Unix, Sparc etc. etc. This means you will never have to use a monitor on the machine again.
To connect, launch a vnc client and connect with:
IP.ADD.RE.SS:1 and then enter.
This is now one killer web server appliance with ftp, sftp.
~~~~~~Mail Server setup~~~~~~
You might as well use LAMPPIX for this also if you have got it installed once already.
The next steps are relatively simple too in the terminal.
- apt-get update.
- apt-get install synaptic
- synaptic
Then search through the packages and look for postfix with mysql option compiled in. then install courier.ALmost done. Sadly, I am going to be very lazy and just link to the resource which I then used to get it all working. This guide does work, but you must ensure that you are using postfix that has been compiled with the - with mysql option enabled.
http://www.sweeney.demon.co.uk/pfix_imap_virtual.html
This is by far the simplest and most direct guide available. If you really are a geek and have gone this far, then you probably don't need me either to go into detail about access control list modification and relay control methods. There are plenty of howtos available too.
I do have a couple tips though, spamd is useful for 'grey listing' spam - i.e. rejecting mail temporarily. All genuine mail will continue to be sent whilst spam engines won't bother resending. However, this relies on even more configuration.
Phew. If all this was too much for you, then don't worry. It is too much for most people. However, once up and running you will no longer be dependent on your ISP for mail since you can use a free domain name from dyndns.
org as your new mail address.
~~~~~~General performance Notes~~~~~~
Yes, these machines won't set speed records, nor will they be good enough as proper servers either. However, if you do have an ADSL connection and want a basic server farm that is very cheap and manageable with adequate performance, these machines are perfect.
The ultimate feature is that Linux can run really well on these boxes and unless you are too afraid of the commandline you get some very powrful and safe systems.
However, they will be able to keep up with most people's connections and needs - we're not going to host MSN or anything here! The key is that this is enough.
~~~~~~Conclusion~~~~~~
I can't recommend this machine or anything similar you can get a hold of. Microsoft is notoriously weak in terms of security on the internet and at least a dedicated firewall box will keep you safer.
The firewall option is also by far the easiest for anyone to get setup and use. Furthermore, these boxes are still useful and so cheap all thanks to the wonders of Linux.
All of this only applies however if you want to setup your own web presence without adverts and you are willing to learn Linux. If you don't want the hassle, there are plenty of web hosts available, and small hardware firewalls that only need to be plugged in.
Hopefully this article will give you a good start if you ever find one of these delightful old computers.
I had lots of fun setting them up - even if it was just to get rid of them instantly. They are so cheap it really does not matter.
Don't overlook this one 
