Guess who's back, lol. *hears crowd cheering* "NOOB #1 NOOB #1!"

Anyway, back to the serious topics here. I'm considering building a server box that will function as both a small game server and file server. Now, my question is as follows.

In order to keep both systems seperate, I'm considering making their own groups and user names. (their being the game and file server). For example give a group and ID as "gameserver" and a group and ID as "file server".

On the gameserver account I'd keep all the game server related stuff in it's own home directory, and on the fileserver account I'd mount my file serving drives in it's own home directory to avoid migrating between both systems (which technically will be one system).

Ok . . . that's confusing enough . . . anyway, my question is, will this be an effective idea? (as in, is it a good idea at all?). Would this help prevent any mingling between both systems (like in case my game server gets hacked, will it at least keep my file server slightly secure until I notice and pull all the plugs and sob in a corner, OR what will most likely happen, I totally screw something up. will it only screw up one account and leave the other intact). Also, will I be able to access both systems (accounts) at the same time. Mind you this will be a base server install (as in strictly CLI).

OR! Another simpler question would be, is this an absolutely HORRIBLE idea that should not even be attempted because of the danger presented toward my file server (that's the most important part for me, really). Any help from the guru's would be much appreciated.

Also . . . be gentle . . . I'm but a Unix infant.

I'll start off with that, I know more questions will arise later. And if you need me to clarify anything, please, don't hesitate to ask. Thank you!

Looking at it from a performance point of view, don't fileservers and game servers have different requirements? I'd imagine game servers wanting a lot of processing power, RAM and as much network bandwidth as they could get to keep latency down and the game playable. If you're hosting something like that I'd move that to a more performant box and keep it in the DMZ.

Separation of rights is fundamental in such a setup. Yes, it is a good idea, and most common network services on most distributions already do something like this (pay attention not only to file ownership, but also to access rights).

Now to the more fundamental problem. If you have any concern about the system getting hacked, don't provide any public services that you don't absolutely trust. It is really as simple as that. If you are really concerned about your fileserver getting "pwn3d" then I would build it as a separate box, and a firewall between them (see dmz suggestion above).

Thanks for the insight! I'll keep those points in mind.

hi there,

good points all. i am currently running a web server and file server off of the same machine. at one point i had BF2 server set up there as well. i hardly experience any issues with performance but depending on your load you may need a separate machine for your gaming server. i would first recommend trying it all on one server, what are the specs of this home server? what is your internet provider, DSL or Cable?

like the second post i would be most concerned about security. definitely place the server behind a firewall. depending on your requirements a basic home router should do, of course you will need to forward all the necessary ports to your server. however if you have the money a hard-ware firewall would be best(what data-hives and server centers have). i personally use just a basic consumer home router. i have also disabled remote root login via ssh. thus making the "bad guys" have to know a user on the system then crack the root user, i think that is more time than more are willing to spend breaking into some home dudes PC. i think you would be more likely to received DOS (denial of service attack) than get your pc hacked into and your probably more like to download a program that allows back door access to your windows box than have your linux box hacked - just a personal thought.

good luck and have fun!

i'm just making a simple server for me and my friends to hop on and frag eachother once in a while.

I have a standard home router as well. Good idea with the root password thing. I'm thinking since it's just a simple small server (and while i'm not a millionaire) to do both on one for a while. My net connection isn't all that great, it's DSL, The machine is an old P4 with a gig of RAM (not Godly, but it's just a small server to goof off on). Of course i'd isolate it via my router's DMZ just so it can't communicate out to the systems on the network. what really concerns me is the data, pfft, they can shut down my server all they want, but my data must stay intact

Frequent backups of files in fileserver acct; always assume it will get trashed...
You might want to look at Tripwire, rkhunter, chkrootkit, Bastille-Linux (a set of security tightening scripts in Perl, so you get the src as well).
It all depends how paranoid you are ...

What kind of data will be on your file server, mp3z, pictures, torrents, etc, etc? If you have an external USB drive you could write a small simple script to move your key files to the USB daily, weekly, etc. To maintain the amount of backups the script could include a time stamp to remove files on your USB external backup older than 10 days.... I personally wouldn't store any sensitive data on my file server, example bank card numbers with passwords. If I had to store them anywhere it would be on a thumb drive even then I remember stuff like that. Other than that my server contains keys, invoices, etc. There is only so much you can do to protect yourself. If you are putting your server behind a router simply don't forward port 22, which of course would prevent any out side access through SSH.

Hah, no, i dont store anything THAT sensitive, just, as you said, mp3s, torrents, vids and stuff. Anything really sensitive is on it's own.

the stuff i have is nothing i can't afford to lose, it's certainly nothing i don't want anyone else to see. just . . . once you get a crap-ton of stuff, you don't want anyone to . . . y'know . . . pwn it, lol.

I'm planning on probably slapping a couple of disks in a small RAID array for slightly more important data in case one of my drives decides to kill itself. I mean, after a while, CDs and DVDs become quite impractical (and expensive and space and time consuming), but again, it's data i can afford to lose, but would rather not.

Bear in mind that cheap raid controllers are all "soft raid" (aka "fakeraid"). This means that a certain amount of work must be done in the processor by the driver for the card. A great many raid cards do not have drivers for linux. Just something to be careful about (if you haven't run into it already). You can set up your own soft raid from linux itself with no special raid hardware. Look up mdadm for more details.

RAID is RAID. The difference between RAID consumer products and RAID commercial products is the huge difference. When you buy a commercial RAID card there is a whole slew of things that go with it, back-planes for mounting/connecting, RAID controller, etc, etc.... For example if you go onto Dell's website and build a server they specifically piece hard ware together for the soul purpose of having guaranteed performance and stability. Of course that comes with a hefty price, but it is reliable and it is what huge companies, organizations, etc use for production.

At home you can get away with your mother boards RAID, I use it and works awesome! The only problem is if your mother board dies or the RAID on board controller dies, you need to replace your mother board with the exact motherboard you have to use the RAID ever again, or else you will not be able to access the data on the RAID array. BUT THAT IS WHY YOU HAVE A BACKUP PLAN and a external device to backup files to!!!! The other option you have is to buy a custom RAID card which in most cases doesn't work with most Linux distro's. Most of the cards are made to work with Enterprise edition Linux distro's as of course thats the market for these cards, NOT people like you and I.

It all comes down to the fact that its your home server and not a production server for a major company doing million dollar deals which needs a secure, reliable, fast server. Of course you want your server to have all of those features but for what you get at the consumer level and what you have described you usage of this server to us I think that you will be more than fine with any consumer product you choose as long as you make sure they are compatible with the setup you want to build.

Check out this store that I shop at all the time. Its called Memory Express. Now obviously you won't have the same store but you can find some cool things on there site that you should be able to get locally! Good luck.... oh and a decent RAID card runs about $450 CAD, I would recommend one for around the $600 CAD range as you get minimum 4 ports with RAID 0, 1 and 5.

Hello, I actually pulled off the server thing. and it works as expected after a little elbow grease (mainly due to my n00bliness and using only CLI, haha). now, i'm thinking of getting a 10k RPM SATA disk (Raptor anyone?) and mounting my gameserver's directory on it (i have a seperate home directory and username and group for the game server as i had planned.) so as to have a . . . high performance disk running the game server. Now along with a high performance disk, I would like some suggestions as to what kind of FS would be beneficial for the performance of a gameserver (yes, this is one huge EXPENSIVE experiment . . . but i figure why not, do it while you're young :P ).

A thought that also came to my mind (which might not work so well sometimes) is how the performance of a 74GB drive and a 150GB drive compare. I know a bit about drives, but not enough to . . . well . . . know about this. Any comment is appreciated.

That's all for now. Thanks in advance!

Hey Traven,

Well I don't know if purchasing just one drive will make that much of a difference. I am not a hard drive buff but I would think you are better off to buy two identical drives and run RAID 0 for best performance (with a good backup plan - backup sensitive files to external drive). I would also recommend lots of ram. I use 3GB in mine and I would like to have 4GB but 3GB seems to be more than enough. I run a BF2 server, VMware Server with a live web server and have no issues..... SO I don't think that purchasing that drive is worth your money. What are your current system specs (is it the specs in your signature? if so thats a lot of ODD hard drives sizes)?

Cheers,

Yea, that's the specs, those are all the drives that i've collected over the years pretty much, i know they are odd, but they add up, haha. the bigger the drive the newer it is. i guess i've been taking good care of my drives that they havent crashed in any of my PCs.

the reason i ask about the drive, is because i've been reading around and i see some suggest that running a 10k RPM drive can help with things like map loading on the server and such. But i've been playing around with it with some friends and stuff and it seems to work just fine. They get very good pings (which surprises me considering my ISP) and everything seems to work and load just fine. so i'll probably just stick to my current set up and leave that space open for another big ol' drive when i get full again.

and DANG do you run alot on that. most i've run so far is a GTA SA:MP server and a CS:S server at once. Most my mobo supports is 2 GB (only two dimm slots).

Well, even if i dont get a new drive, just for reference, what would make a good FS for a game server in everyone's opinion?

Thats a good question. I don't have to much knowledge with file systems, I just use the basic "ext 3." I would think the latest file system which is proven to work well. I don't know how much more you could boost your performance from having a different FS? If someone knows this or your do Traven please explain.

Thanks!