[wplug] Setting up a server using just console tools

[John]

Mike,

Honestly that's the best way to really learn what's going on behind the
scenes.  Also don't think that you can't run a X with only 64M ram cause you
can, just get don't use KDE or Gnome, I would suggest either Windowmaker
(www.windowmaker.org) or fluxbox (flubox.sourceforge.net), both are very
capable window managers with very small memory footprints.

Use rxvt instead of xterm/eterm/gnome-terminal, it also requires less
memory.

Also, if you look in /etc/inittab you'll see 6 console terminals spawning,
you can cut those down as well to 2/3 consoles.  Then go through some of the
services that you have running that you may or may not need, cut down on the
number of apache processes, make sure lpd is not started, there is a bunch
of fat you can trim from the normal 7.3 install that will allow you to run X
and a decent machine with 64M of ram, it can be done.

There is another light version of Xfree somewhere that I remember, a quick
hit of freshmeat didn't return what I was looking for and I couldn't
remember the name of it for nothing, but if you can find that you can run X
in a much smaller memory footprint as well.

Good luck!

- John

-----Original Message-----
From: wplug-admin at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-admin at wplug.org] On Behalf Of
Procario, Michael
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 5:59 PM
To: 'wplug at wplug.org'
Subject: [wplug] Setting up a server using just console tools



My father-in-law bought a new machine recently and gave me his 300 MHz K6-2
to do with as I please. I decided to make it a family server. We have
multiple machines in the house but somebody always needs a file that is on
the already occupied machine. A server looks like the best solution. 

I installed Redhat 7.3 since I had it sitting around. I chose to not install
X, since I will not need X and it only has 64 MB of memory. All went well in
the install, and when asked for a security level, I chose medium. This setup
firewall rules for ipchains. I hate to see what high security is. As far as
I can tell the only packets it was letting through were the DHCP packets. It
did have an IP address after I rebooted. 

I will need ssh to connect to the box and manage it after I take its monitor
away, so I needed to open port 22. I started reading man pages and they were
pretty opaque. I got the HOWTO and that was much clearer. In the end it took
one command using ipchains to let ssh through and one to save the change. I
still need to work on getting smb and nmb through so it can actually act as
a server, but that does not look so hard. 

You really feel like you have learned something after you do it command line
style.  I look forward to attacking it again tonight.

Mike

--
Mike Procario
DOE - Division of High Energy Physics
 

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