Is this possible / easier / with Linux? Home Network, auto FTP backup, WWW accessable
 

I'm gathering some hardware for a home network and wanted to know how I could go about doing the following:

1. Set up a network that's accessable from our XP and Vista PCs to allow them to store docs, pics etc. (Already found out this info)

2. Can I have the linux server back up to my remotely-hosted FTP server whenever there is a change on the linux side?

3. Can I automatically do backup images of the computers that connect to the linux server weekly/monthly (then get backed up to the FTP server)?

4. Can the files on the linux home server be accessable from the internet? I have a dynamic IP from my cable company, and have dabbled in DynDNS before. This would just be for my use when I travel, not any large sharing site. How should this be secured?




My linux skills are very rudimentary, but I have managed in the past to convert an old XBox and install linux on it :)
Unfortunately before I got a chance to play with it, I lost it to a power surge.

Thank you for all of your help

Sincerely,

Wannabe

1. samba
2. rsync
3. possibly dd (maybe you need norton ghost or something)
4. apache, ftp, scp (scp is the safest)

Samba - very complicated details for security, takes at least a day for a newbie to figure out a simple file share where the linux box is the host. Most of the time, you can access the windows box with a file manager and smb://ip.of.the.machine
ftp - some what insecure, easier to set up.
nfs - I believe vista has support and xp might as well... not recommended for windows shares.

Most likely yes. May require custom scripts. would take some learning. possibly a chron job (timed event)

'images' like ghost? of any computer that connects? sounds complicated. rsync however has some features to do back ups of individual files... I don't think you are going to find an easy way to make 'images' though.

you would need to open up a port on your router, have the linux box listen to the port for an ftp server, have the files shared under the ftp server (symbolic links are usually defaulted to off... I think...), and have one of those auto updating dns things for your dynamic ip (for convenience)

damn... I was beaten

1, -

2. Flyback / Time machine - I'm not sure these do remote, but they can monitor for changes and make snapshots. you could then use rsync or something to get the data offsite.

3 Acronis true Image - if it's actually an automated imaging solution you want. (clonezilla is opensource but I don't know what options there are for automation of images. if you want to make a manual image of the machine with clonezilla then just backup data look at backuppc

4. SSL Explorer - SSL (web based VPN interface )

Not really. Just install samba, and add something like this into /etc/samba/smb.conf

It could hardly be easier. Then you fire up samba, and if there's no firewalling doing weird things, you should be able to reach your /samba dir from windows. Then it's a matter of reading, learning, adding and changing stuff and tightening the security a bit. Of course you need to make sure that both computers IPs and subnets are in the same range and that the work groups are the same in the case of windows. Ping comes in handy to check if a given computer can see the ip of another computer in the same net.

About 2 and 3, all you need is a cron job, and a tool to do backups. rsync is probably the best for incremental backups. But you can use whatever you want. I advise using standard tools, because that's what you will have in your livecd if something really bad happens.

I can't imagine why would I use ghost for windows or dos, when there are around 12 trillions of ways to do backup (at file level and at image level) in linux natively. However, I don't recommend at all doing image backups while the fs's are mounted with write enabled. You are going to end with a corrupted image because you can't guarantee that the fs is not gonna change while the image is being created. There's really no point in using disk images are backups... Do backups at file level, and use incremental tools when possible like rsync. That will take care of about everything that the OP wanted. That, and cron.

You can use ddclient in linux to take care of autoupdating your ip in dyndns when needed. For the rest, you just need to run the correct server for whatever service you want to access remotely, and make sure your firewall is not locking it. This is a very wide topic, and we can't explain you how to setup every existing server on a simple post.

To the original poster, I recommend you to rethink the strategy for everything, and then open one thread for every problem. It's more likely that the thread will be of any use if you solve one problem at a time.