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Dr. Slack

Tue Oct 16 2007, 02:15PM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

Ok, that's got the first bit, the name, sorted.

What I want is a low power home hub general purpose PC that does everything. Probably AMD Geode / Linux. But when I took my specification to the Linuxistas at work, they all drew air through their teeth and backed away. Now is this because what I want to do is difficult, or impossible, or just takes a lot more investment in time and getting to grips with than they were prepared to explain to me?

Simple enough spec really. A box, with several Ethernet and USB ports, and a WiFi AP. DSL cable modem to one port. Implements internet firewall, and shares the connection to the radio and cabled ethernet ports, with timed user permissions. Shares hard disks, with permissions, to users. Various printers plug into USB, visible to all users, perhaps even a scanner. All the users would be XP initially. I did look at the Freescale NAS box initially, but this differentiaites between wired and WiFi users of printers, and is not as general purpose.

Does such a bundle exist? How much effort, starting from zero Linux, would I need to put one together? I know all the resources exist out there somewhere, but are any tailored tutorials for this sort of application. Or is this too ambitious for a learning project, and I should just get a single user machine together to play with first? By current practice I'm windoze only, but there's been plenty of command line, assembler, VAX-VMS type experience in the past, and I much prefer a well documented script to any number of gooey wizards to do stuff.

I am sure there must be many people like me with this requirement, there may be an opportunity for somebody to peddle a value-added bundle that does just this?

...

Tue Oct 16 2007, 02:34PM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

Well, the wifi AP can be very easy if you have well supported card. You just do something like yum install madwifi, and then use the tools to set up whatever you need.

Implementing the firewall is equally as easy, just use iptables. There is even support for routes that are only active for a certian time period. Although to the best of my knowledge three isn't any nice GUIs that can do advanced route editing.

Samba can be used to share data/printers easily, which per-user permissions. Although if you get any linux boxen running I would rather use sshfs for data shares and using cups (the printer daemon) directly for sharing the printers.

As to the scanned, there is the SANE scanner server, which does support having clients connect over the network, and there is a client for it that works under windows called XSane.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no distro that comes preconfigured out of the box to do what you want. However, all of the big ones come with samba, iptables, and cups, and sane is an easy download.

I would expect it to take about 20-50 hours for you to get it workng perfectally.

Steve Conner

Tue Oct 16 2007, 03:19PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

It took me a good few months of evenings and weekends to get about half of what you described, and I had a few years of previous Linux experience. You'd be surprised how much more of an investment in time and effort it is than *anyone* would be prepared to explain to you. There's a reason why free software is free.

I still have to use an external router-modem-firewall-Wi-Fi-access-point thingy, but that's no great problem since my ISP gave me it free anyway. And I haven't dared to open the can of worms that is printing under *nix.

I used an old 733MHz Compaq P3 that consumes about 75W by the time the modem-router and UPS are added in.

Here's what I did get working:

File sharing on my home network with Samba, and anywhere else with SFTP and w2box. I chose samba because I mostly run XP for my desktop, and the linux box sits headless in a cupboard. :P

Backups of all my other machines with rsync. I used Cygwin to get rsync on my windows machines.

High quality MP3s and streaming internet radio, controllable from any other machine, using mpd, mplayer, phpMP, and a Delta-66 24-bit soundcard.

Source code control for my programming projects with CVS (should have used Subversion instead though)

On a related note, I managed to get CVS to control my Firefox bookmarks too, so they are the same on every machine I use, at home, work or wherever.

Lately, a nifty LCD display that promises to be able to control mpd and mplayer too. :)

I'll try adding a print server one day if I'm feeling masochistic

But it has already paid for itself several times over with the source code control and Apache/PHP/MySQL facilities. It's currently awaiting a hard drive upgrade so I can start backing up the 320GB drive that holds my audio projects...

Dr. Slack

Tue Oct 16 2007, 07:29PM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

There's a reason why free software is free.

Even stuff I pay for (or should have paid for) doesn't always do [ What I think it should | What I want it to | What it says on the tin | What I hoped it would do | What the guy at work said it should do ]

but I take the general point

So does anybody want to create one and sell it to people like me (I'll take a small marketting cut for defining the product), I'll beta-site it for you.

Dr. Slack

Mon Nov 19 2007, 08:14AM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

Perhaps Windows Home Server fits my specification quite well? Comments? I don't really want to sell what's left of my soul to Bill, but I guess his business model came from somewhere.

thedatastream

Mon Nov 19 2007, 03:47PM

Registered Member #505 Joined: Sun Nov 19 2006, 06:42PM
Location: Yorkshire!
Posts: 329

PC Pro carried a favourable review of Home Server in its last edition. Or at least, the last edition that my Dad gave me.

I've got minimal Linux experience but have managed to set up an Xbox with Debian running Samba as a backup server by closely following a HOWTO and a bit of imagination. However, RAID and other things have eluded me so far and I shafted the bloody thing by trying to upgrade the Kernel. Back to square 1 possibly.

I would love to do something like this using Linux, however I suspect repeated inquiries from "the Boss" about where this backup drive is might slow things down.

One of the best things about doing a server like this is if you get an SSH client, you can admin it using the laptop whilst sat on the sofa watching the wife watching Holby City

no more antisocial computing

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