Hi all,

I'm just after a lean linux box to stick outside of my firewall and allow
transferral of odds and ends between colleagues. By lean, I mean to run on
a P120 with 16MB of RAM and a 500MB disk.

Services-wise I can probably live with just the webserver, but it needs to
run a file upload script too. (Yes, I'd rather have an ftp server, but
some of the people I deal with are not that knowledgable when it comes to
computers, so web's easier)

Any recommendations for a good distribution to try that won't take me
weeks of fine-tuning but is also pretty lean straight out of the box (the
former perhaps rules out Slackware, and the latter Redhat)??

Other issue is backup in the event of someone hacking the machine and
trashing it. I don't care about any data that's on it as that'll only be
transient, but I would like to quickly be able to rebuild the system in
the event of a problem. I was wondering about just using dd to make a
block-by-block copy of the whole drive to somewhere safe, which I can spit
back onto the machine's drive if needs be. Does that seem sensible?

cheers

Jules

On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:50:58 +0000, Jules <julesrichardsonuk@remove.this.yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> I'm just after a lean linux box to stick outside of my firewall and allow
> transferral of odds and ends between colleagues. By lean, I mean to run on
> a P120 with 16MB of RAM and a 500MB disk.

Slackware Linux doesn't require an extremely powerful system to
run (though having one is quite nice . It will run on systems
as far back as the 386. Below is a list of minimum system
requirements needed to install and run Slackware.

* 386 processor
* 16MB RAM
* 50 megabytes of hard disk space
* 3.5" floppy drive

Additional hardware may be needed if you want to run the X Window
System at a usable speed or if you want network capabilities.

--
<< http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >>
"He flung himself on his horse and rode madly off in all directions"

Jules <julesrichardsonuk@remove.this.yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message news:<pan.2003.12.15.17.50.57.921255@remove.this.y ahoo.co.uk>...
> Other issue is backup in the event of someone hacking the machine and
> trashing it. I don't care about any data that's on it as that'll only be
> transient, but I would like to quickly be able to rebuild the system in
> the event of a problem. I was wondering about just using dd to make a
> block-by-block copy of the whole drive to somewhere safe, which I can spit
> back onto the machine's drive if needs be. Does that seem sensible?

From what I understand, dd will copy the entire disk each time it's
run. Which is fine if you only plan on running the backup one time,
after initial setup of the server. But if you plan on keeping the
backup in sync with the server, then it's much more efficient to use
rsync:

rsync -av --delete --exclude '/mnt/backup/' / /mnt/backup/

This makes the disk at /mnt/backup/ an exact copy of /. You can swap
it directly into the original disk's place and it'll work. (The only
thing is that you'll have to boot from a CDrom or floppy one time, to
run lilo on the backup disk once.)

Of course, with a 500MB disk, running dd probably won't take all that
long anyway...

-Anthony
http://nodivisions.com/