[NCLUG] Network configuration

[dobbster]

> I suppose it depends on how much web traffic your company gets and how many
> current web hits you get; 256 K up is not all *that* much... you could use
> a 486 w/ 16 megs of RAM and saturate your DSL line (I've seen this done,
> BTW), so your Pentium with 96 megs will be more than adaquate.

I have no idea.  I need to somehow analyze the traffic on our current
servers...

Glad to hear that the Pentium should suffice.

> If I understand you correctly, this could get pretty messy... if you open
> up port 80 on the firewall, you can forward that port to one of internal
> machines... only one of them. Unless, of coures, you're running Apache on
> the firewall, but that kinda defeats the purpose of the firewall.

I didn't know that...  But if I run a single virtual server, it seems
like it might work.  The consensus received thus far is to have a DMZ,
so I might try to figure out how to arrange that instead.


> You can usually tell a "secure" environment from a non-secure one because
> they have ports that aren't in use firewalled, they're running a later
> version of Apache, and they're NOT running sendmail.
> 
> Qmail and Postfix rule the arena of secure MTAs, and you really are taking
> a hit security-wise if you run sendmail on your firewall... as long as
> you're learning about Linux, why not do some reading on Postfix/Qmail;
> they're not all that hard to configure, and I know for sure that Qmail has
> never been hacked (with some caveats).

Okay...  I am sold.  More reading yet.

> > So far, I've been using Mandrake 6.x/7.x.  I use the stock "secure"
> > kernel, and I have the services protected by
> 
> What is secure about the "secure kernel"?

Well, it says 2.2.15-4mdksecure.  Other than that I have no clue.

> Too bad you're not in SLO... you'd probably be interested in
> http://www.lug.calpoly.edu/sym/ ;-)

Definitely...  I wish they had something like that here!  How do people
learn all of this stuff, anyway?

Thank you very much for the feedback...

Mark (dobbster at frii.com)