Hi all,

I'm hoping to help a church i volunteer for deploy a Linux File server to a Hospital being setup in the Solomon Islands. The team fly's out in 3 weeks.

I've been experimenting with Samba to provide a simple and secure file server, and the config I have now is stable.

I was interested in hearing advice from other people who have setup servers in remote locations that will have to fend for themselves.

I've discovered a program called Monit, which can restart a service if it needs to and send me an email about the event.

I was hoping to also track down a program that will send me weekly log file reports, just so I can keep a record of logs, incase something happens down the track.

I've seen a few programs out there such as nagios, and syslog-ng , I'd appreciate and welcome any comments / story's and advice.

Thanks

You don't mention what hardware you are using, ideally your hardware would have something like an iLO (HP) or DRAC (Dell) card or similar, that would allow you more control than SSH alone can give. (Things such as remote power control, remote media mounting and a few others).

Regarding logs you can go down a number of routes, you could use "logwatch" to check and mail you logs on a daily/weekly basis, you could syslog to a server closer to you for investigation and of course you could re-direct any e-mails generated from cron jobs to your own e-mail rather than the root user on the local server.

The reality is that there's no difference in administering a remote server over a local server, the concepts are exactly the same it just becomes a little more involved if there's anything that needs to be done at the physical server.

Of the 30+ servers I administer only around 5 are in the same location as myself, the rest are in data centers around the city. For my personal servers I have one in Ireland, one in Germany, and one in the US, of which I've only ever seen the Irish one (as I built it myself).

Nagios is very handy for monitoring a lot of parameters on servers, I also use this across all the servers I admin and have it monitoring ping, disk space, processes, memory and a few other parameters. You could set up a local Nagios instance on the actual server and either use this to monitor itself or have it send notifications back to a central Nagios instance.

All of these are fairly well documented and a quick Google search should give you the information you need.