azekeil

I've spent a lot of time recently getting my (and

kissycat1000's) servers sorted out. Now I am proud to announce that:

My gateway machine now has an FTP server running on it! Woohoo! There is a script (also available to chocojon and jikatal) to add users. Unfortunately I haven't sorted out traffic shaping yet so if I add people they will leech our bandwidth horribly. So I won't be accepting requests for users until traffic shaping is sorted. Sorry.
Squid network caching (not-transparent) is set up on the gateway machine. It's quite slow, running on a Celeron 300 with 128MB RAM that is also doing quite a few other things. But it will save the larger objects which is what I'm interested in. Hmm, in fact, I think I might tune it to JUST save the larger objects. [Later: damn, squid doesn't seem to support a MINIMUM cache object size *sigh*][Later still: Oh, it does, it's just WEBMIN that doesn't support it *double sigh*. Still, all working now]
All this has been set up with the aid of webmin, running over SSL. This allows me to securely configure most common applications using a GUI. I don't have to learn complex config files for each application. This is a Good Thing™. Of course, I might have to to fine tune them, but that can come later. Webmin allows me to configure ProFTPd, Squid AND IPTables firewalls, as well as your everyday stuff. Not bad huh?
There have been a few hiccups with The Beast which turned out to be because of the relay switch I used in conjunction with the second ATX power supply. Back to good old fashioned manual switching AT power supply. Not before having to 'rescue' the array. At least I know how to do that now if/when it requires it *sigh*.

And for the weekend stuff, see

kissycat1000's entry or

florence90's entries, especially the one with pictures.