Use Tables!

… I’ll type it out.

So. The page you’re currently reading is served by ‘Gauntlet’, the name of my firewall box (my main box is called ‘archer’, hence the name of the subdomain). The name was derived from Dan Brown’s book Digital Fortress, where Gauntlet is a packet filterer used by the NSA to protect their ultra-secret database. Seeing as my firewall is a little less important, it could do with lesser specs.

Gauntlet runs on the following:

ASUS P2B motherboard
Pentium 2 350Mhz
256MB SDRAM
6.4 GB Quantum Fireball harddrive
6.5 GB Maxtor harddrive
2 generic RealTek-like network cards, one connected to my ISP, one to Archer

It currently runs Debian Sarge 3.1, with apache 2, php 4 and mysql 4 powering the webserver part. It has KDE installed in case I grow tired of ssh-ing to it (only accessible from the local network for now).
The firewall is done using iptables and shorewall, a simpler way of configuring said iptables. The box also runs a dns server with a cache, to make my lookups a bit faster, and a dhcp server to provide no-brain network access from my main box. Many thanks to the author of this tutorial, it helped a lot (though it did not explain setting up all the other crap that runs on this machine, nor my trouble with the ancient sucky SiS graphics card, nor that with MySQL doing anything but what I wanted it to do at first, nor with the different flavours of Apache 2 that Debian currently ships).

Currently I’m happy with the way it runs, it all seems smooth from here (though I guess the local network is a bit of an idealized way of looking at things). We’ll see what happens when I try to use p2p software or other stuff that might not like Gauntlet as much as I do :-).

So from the looks of it, I just succeeded in setting up WordPress on my old (new) firewall box. Some more info on that box as soon as I can find a decent utility to compose a summary of the box by itself, for now suffice it to say that it plays firewall, cvs-server and webserver at once, and my normal desktop hangs off a second NIC on the box (with a bit of help from a crossover cable).

I have one other thing to add: thanks to Samuel Sieb, I now know of the existence of WinSCP. It’s a windows client to connect to a machine using SFTP or SCP as desired. It’s very userfriendly, installation was smooth, and I transferred files without any trouble whatsoever. Which is great, of course.