Hello all.

I have recently been blessed with some extra bandwidth, and was wanting to setup a freeshell account service. I already use a freeshell account alot and Im quite fond of it! I would like to give something back to the Linux community and allow users to use some of my systems. Unfortunately I am still rather new to linux. As much as I hate to admit it. Anyway I was wondering if anyone could help me in setting up a free shell account. I really have no idea to go about doing it. Setting up the hosting, securing and setting up user accounts, sendmail,irc. The whole nine yards. I wasnt sure where to post this since it covers a broad range of topics. Any advice or help would be great!

I would have to say I commend you on doing this. Its a great idea, as I am currently building a system for myself a few friends. If it works out well and I am able to work out any problems that may arrise, I will try to get a system on a dedicated link in a server farm or something. As for now, what I am doing is using Slack 9.1 on an extra system using my cable modem service (1.5Mbit down / 512K up).

Of course I have openssh for my sshd, installed apache with the userdir mod. That allows each user to have a www dir and then have hosting of the system out of their home dir.

Allowing more than just friends, I would recommend not setting up screen, or maybe limiting screen to only people in a certain group, because then you're looking at people running their own daemons and such.

I have also installed centericq for instant messaging.. great program. There are a lot of options, you just have to weigh out what kind of stuff you would allow and what you wouldn't.

Thanks for the reply.Thats a good idea, I use an account from freeshell.org, and they have it kinda setup like that. I imagine I would have to setup some kinda registration system of sorts. I know there are alot of oportunities for wrong doing on an open system like that especially if there is an internet connection. I would like to offer say like links,w3m and lynx browsing, naim, and maybe telnet. I dont know. I want users to be able to use it like it was their own system, to an extent. I think it would really help newbies to get familiar with bash, and not have to worry about hosing their own system.

The system I have to set it up on is an older Dell Poweredge , its a Dual Pentium Pro 200mhz, with 512mb of ram, and about 14 9-gb scsi drives on an array. Its not new, but it should be enough for most people. I was hoping to just let members of this forum use it. That would be cool. You know we could have email setup, and use write and talk to chat , or have chat rooms setup. I just think it would be a great resource. I know alot of time on the the forums, I will post something, then the other guy will post and we just go back and forth, it would be easier if we could just have real-time chat.

Also for the uplink, Im trying to setup a dual wan linux router. I would use a cable connetion and DSL. I already have cable, and its okay. I just know I will probably want a little more. I still havent figured out how to set it up. I have a post on this forum, but no one has replied yet, so I guess I'll have to buy a twin wan router. My cable is kinda slow, so I need the DSL to pick up the slack.

Sounds like a plan...

I currently maintain a number of boxes. My home linux server provides email, web hosting and shell accounts to friends and I have a remote dedicated hosting server although I don't tend to give out shell accounts on that box for security reasons.

I would first start playing with setting up mail and web hosting. My recommendations would be exim for smtp mail and apache for web hosting.
Also look into getting something like courier-imap and/or courier-pop so people can get their mail remotely if you want to offer such services. I also run IMP for webmail.

I would probably recommend using gentoo (install will take a while but its worth it) or debian.
Both distros you can start by just installing a base system then only install exactly what you need on the box (i.e. your not going to be needing X and the like)

Debian makes it easy to get things like web and email services up and runing. Personally I feel this is dangerous as you don't always get a feel for whats going on. You install things they 'just work' and you think nothing of it until you realise you would like feature X in your mailserver but it hasn;t been compiled with that feature.

Installing gentoo will give you a much better idea on how linux works as a system and the jobs different tools do that you wouldn't normally deal with directly (things like cron and logrotate).
It will also give you much more control over packages, what options they are compiled with etc... That way you can only enable the features in software that you need, thus again you know exactly whats going on.

This means you know exactly what is going on your system which makes it easier to maintian in the long run.

Also you will get the best performace out of your box by compiling everything from source.

feel free to contact me if you need any help or advice although I'm going to be busy with uni finals for the next few months so I can't guarentee the speed of my response.

Cornet

This sounds like a great idea. Definetly something worth pursuing. As far as software goes, I would recommend the usual suspects, apache for web, openssh for ssh, sendmail for mail. An irc server may be a good idea, or maybe even one of them java chat rooms that can be run from the web server if you build the right support for it. As for the os, I would say go for something like freebsd, for me it is very powerful and thrives in a multi-user environment (not that linux doesn't, bsd is just my personal preference here). Also, you're going to make sure you have tight permissions on dirs and executables, you don't want anybody running thinkgs that they shouldn't be able to. Well, definetly keep going at this! If you need any help, I'll do my best to help out, as I have some experience in setting up sshd, apache, sendmail, ftp and other things of that nature. Good luck.

I run a free shell service of my own at www.moonlightglade.net.
I have an irc channel #moonlight on irc.moonlightglade.net, and
there is another service on www.rulex.net (irc.rulex.net #rulex.net) that you might
want to check out too.

It'd be nice if we could all get together and swap tips, or at least have a
laugh about the good stuff

-Ashen