thelinuxlink.net

Awesome idea?!?

http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS7601019362.html

WARNING: The following was written by an OpenBSD user!

If spending less time setting up a server, also means spending less time securing the server, or paying attention to security in general, then it's an absolutely terrible idea!

However, I'd expect a "template" for say a web server, to be set up to be secure (Anything else would be silly), because getting compromised because of laziness, is just the stupidest thing in the world in this regard.

what do you think of dsbsd. aka dsl under linux.

davijordan wrote:what do you think of dsbsd. aka dsl under linux.

??? I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.

it is suppose to be a bsd equivalent of DSL(damn small linux).

davijordan wrote:it is suppose to be a bsd equivalent of DSL(damn small linux).

I assume you mean this project: http://www.damnsmallbsd.org

Well, the project page states:

Current Status
As of right now, we are still in the very early initial stage of development, so we do not have an official release yet. If you are brave, you can see the developers page for information on how to obtain a copy of DSBSD.

So it's still a young project, so it'd be hard to really say anything.

yep. I would love to see how it works on old small hd machines. People have told me that bsd is even great for old 486 machines. I thought about using old low power 486 motherboards (with disk on modules) for some special projects. Cheaper than to buy an embedded board!

davijordan wrote:yep. I would love to see how it works on old small hd machines. People have told me that bsd is even great for old 486 machines.

You don't have to use a "Damn Small" BSD for that, any of the three traditional BSDs (FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD) would work fine on that sort of machine. I have an old 450 MHz AMD K6 box (Which I rarely use because of the noise this thing makes) which runs OpenBSD, and it works really really well. I've also tried FreeBSD on it, that also worked fine.

davijordan wrote:I thought about using old low power 486 motherboards (with disk on modules) for some special projects. Cheaper than to buy an embedded board!

If you wanna build a firewall box, take a look at m0n0wall or pfSense, those are really awesome firewall-specific distributions of FreeBSD.

Actually, I had some non-internet uses in mind, such as a security system among other things.

davijordan wrote:Actually, I had some non-internet uses in mind, such as a security system among other things.

What in particular do you mean?

The parallel port is an amazing thing. You can monitor and control so many things with only a few parts. I would like to be able not only to monitor entry/exit points to certain areas of a building, but to use the internet to contact me of any changes. I also have plans to use it in data gathering with sports equipment. An old motherboard with several parallel ports can be one awesome tool. Every computer is a goldmine of possibilities.
Along time ago, I wrote a basic language program to monitor the front door of my apartment via the joystick port. I also had installed a program that would talk using a script phonetically through the speaker. My program would record the time of the door opening, closing, and call the program that could talk. So when the door opened, out of the computer came "Warning there is an intruder" repeatedly. I unfortunately scared the crap out of the maintenance man one day. I then had to disable it.

davijordan wrote:The parallel port is an amazing thing. You can monitor and control so many things with only a few parts. I would like to be able not only to monitor entry/exit points to certain areas of a building, but to use the internet to contact me of any changes. I also have plans to use it in data gathering with sports equipment. An old motherboard with several parallel ports can be one awesome tool. Every computer is a goldmine of possibilities.
Along time ago, I wrote a basic language program to monitor the front door of my apartment via the joystick port. I also had installed a program that would talk using a script phonetically through the speaker. My program would record the time of the door opening, closing, and call the program that could talk. So when the door opened, out of the computer came "Warning there is an intruder" repeatedly. I unfortunately scared the crap out of the maintenance man one day. I then had to disable it.

HA! That's funny man. Cool stuff!