Community Matters

This took longer than I thought. Inertia. It’s a bad thing. The blog, mail server and everything else was sort of working (if slowly) on the old laptop. So I never had a lot of pain that would make me jump up and make all the changes to the infrastructure that I wanted to make.

But finally after more than a month I think we are getting there. Now we have an ancient x86 laptop (sounds like a theme, doesn’t it? I think this one is an original Pentium M Banias at 1.4GHz) running as firewall/router. It cleanly separates the external network (including the wireless cloud that I have our neighbors on) from the internal network and the DMZ. I started with some very basic (and very restrictive) Shorewall rules and slowly and carefully opened those ports and connections that I really needed.

Behind that sits an upgraded Mac Mini (hooray for eBay and the online instructions that tell you how to open and expand the Mini) running an Intel Core Duo T2400 at 1.83GHz with 2GB of memory (this used to be a low-end 1.5GHz Core Solo with 512MB). And the PowerBook G4 as backup server in case I need to take the Mini off-line for something.

All three systems are running Debian Etch with the latest patches and some backported newer components (for example a 2.6.23 kernel and a newer version of SpamAssasin and Shorewall than are currently available in Etch).

And while I was at it I upgraded the second Mac Mini as well (similar specs, only the second cpu I got through eBay was a T2300 at 1.66GHz) and am running the latest pre-release of OS X Leopard on it. Nicer than Linux as a client. But I’m very happy that my whole server infrastructure is back on Linux – much easier to work with and much easier to keep up-to-date.