After many many many years I have decided to swap my ISP from BT to Zen in order to get myself a range of fixed IP's. The end goal is access from the web of several devices I have on the network (cctv, tivo, future home automation etc...).

This all works to a point at the moment, I host the different services on different ports and use the features in my DSL router to point things in the right direction. What I would like is one single secure web gateway/interface to all these systems with a secure login etc...

I would like to keep general internet access seperate from this system and behind a firewall of some kind. I have a spare PC and the current cctv server ready for use, but I am not finding much that can do what I want and I am way out of my depth, so I thought someone here may like to point me in the right direction

Cheers

Cris.

You can run Apache on your gateway and get it to proxy stuff into your internal network. Turn on passwords and it should be reasonably secure as well.

If you don't want it on the gateway then port forward from the firewall to your webserver box instead.

If you really want to use a range of external IP addresses (rather than DNAT on a firewall), then the thing you need in front of them all is a "bridging firewall" (or "transparent" firewall).

Linux can do this, of course.

Cheers

So what would be the best option to use my slimserver from both side of the network?

Are there any good "dummy" type websites for this stuff?

Cheers

Cris.

I'd set it up with Apache's "reverse proxy" feature. Just google on that and see what comes up. I assume that it'll work on a non-Unix Apache, but I don't know for sure.

So, after looking into the whole thing I have ended up running ClarkConnect. It's my first outing onto a Linux based system, and I seem to be getting on with it fine. I haven't got to grips with the whole reverse proxy thing yet, but I get the idea.

It's all running off a 1GHz C3 Mini-ITX board in one of these! I didn't pay that price for it, they are really nice people, I went to see them and they did me a really good deal. I also splashed out and got 2 new 250Gb WD RE from Scan. I am so happy with the format, I think I am going to shift the CCTV server into one too

Thanks for the pointers, I am learning lots of new things here, I even found myself picking up books on PHP and MySQL at the bookshop over the weekend

Cheers

Cris.

I have been running ClarkConnect for several years and I'm also very happy with it. I'm also running my mailserver and webserver off it.

Stig

Glad to be of help

They are great cases for the price, I'm in Manchester quite a bit these days, so I went down to their unit to pick them up. Very nice people, willing to offer loads of advice, and gave me a demo of just about every single product they offer.

Check out the cheesey photo of my under the stairs rack...



The 4U server above the new mini-atx, is very loud, comes out at about 55dB on my sound meter, so I think the swap out will happen sonner rather than later.

Cheers

Cris.

That's a nice little home rack you've got there, is that off the shelf or did you make it yourself?

Matthew

That's a great looking rack, Cris(sie)

Definitely custom. MDF?

Those massive power plugs really add to the effect -- much more impressive than the skinny wee ones we have over this side!

Cheers

Yeah, that looks a little over the top.

I'm sure theres more than one of us on here who could knock you something up with a NTC/PTC/dallas one wire sensor + microcontroller (dare I say it PIC/AVR) that would dump the temperature to the serial port.

Actually, I bet there's hundreds of PIC projects on the web that do what you want!

When I wanted temperature monitoring I got this kit, complete with pre-programmed PIC for about $25. It is still plugged into my server and working well.

Thanks to my T2e purchase I shouldn't need to worry about monitoring the temperature in my garage for much longer.

Your computer probably has some sort of in-case ambient temperature sensor. It won't be the same as the room's ambient temperature, but I bet it's pretty easy to assume from that.

If you look close at the 4U rackmount case it has 2 temperature displays on the front, one is on the HD's and one is the room temp, the sensors are on leads so they can be positioned, so I know there is a heat problem from looking at them.

What I want is a solution that will allow me to monitor the temps on a webpage, and automatically activate some form of cooling system when needed, without me having to go open the door for a bit

It's not major problem at the moment, but if I do move to a server system that has no active cooling at all it could become one I think. For now I guess I will just keep on opening the door every few days and letting the heat escape into the house.

Cheers

Cris.

Thank looks just the ticket! Is it easy to get the result displayed on a webpage using those methods? That is one area I don't have a clue in.

Cheers

Cris.

Relatively easy, yes. For example, I display the temperature of my garage here. You can see all the other crap that I monitor here.

To do this I use a couple of shell scripts and mrtg.

N.B. anyone who is any good at Unix shell scripts, sed and the like, cover your eyes now. My Unix commandline knowledge is just barely enough to get by with stuff like this and I know it is nasty...

The first shell script is called "tempread" and looks like this:

Code:

---

#!/bin/bash

echo `head -n 3 /dev/ttyS0 | tail -n 1`

---

When you start reading data from the serial port (/dev/ttyS0) you get the following output:

Code:

---

R V1.0 2001-10-13 11:56:11 C



1 0012.68



1 0012.68



1 0012.75



... (it keeps outputing the temperature until you stop reading

---

So my shell script uses "head" to grab the first three lines of the output of the serial port. It then uses "tail" to grab the last line of the three.

The "tick" marks, i.e. the ` characters, tell bash to run the command inside and return the text generated.

So the output of tempread looks like:

Code:

---

1 0012.68

---

The next shell script is "tempmrtg":

Code:

---

#!/bin/bash

echo "`/usr/local/bin/tempread |cut -c 5-9` * 100" | bc | sed s/.00$//

echo "0"

echo "0"

echo "0"

---

This is the script that generates the output for mrtg. Because mrtg is really designed for monitoring router throughput usage it only deals with integers. It expects four values from any scripts it calls. The first is the throughtput in, second throughput out and the last two I forget.

Because I want better than whole number resolution I multiply my temperature by 100. So if the temperature is 12.68 I end up returning 1268 to mrtg.

The first line of "tempmrtg" calls "tempread", extras the temperature digits using cut, combines the temperature with "* 100" and passes that to bc (and command line calculator). It then uses a regex and sed to strip the ".00" off of the end of the resulting value.

The last thing is an entry in the mrtg config file that tell it to call "tempmrtg" to get the values:

Code:

---

Target[temp]: `/usr/local/bin/tempmrtg`

MaxBytes[temp]: 4000

YTicsFactor[temp]: 0.01

Factor[temp]: 0.01

Options[temp]: gauge, nopercent, noo, transparent

XSize[temp]: 600

YSize[temp]: 150

YLegend[temp]: Temp

ShortLegend[temp]: C

LegendO[temp]:  Nowt:

LegendI[temp]:  Temp C:

Title[temp]: Server room temp

PageTop[temp]: <H1>Server room Temperature

 </H1>

  <TABLE>

    <TR><TD>System:</TD><TD>Server room temp</TD></TR>

  </TABLE>

---

Amongst other things this tell mrtg that:
- it should run "tempmrtg" to get the values for this graph
- that it should divide all the values by 100
- that the temperature will never be more than 40 degrees
- that there is only one value to graph ("noo" tells it that)

Now that I have written all that down it seems a little more complex than I remembered

There are tools that I probably better than mrtg for this stuff now. I use mrtg because that is what I know. The most likely canditate would be rrdtool.

The bbs is double spacing all my code blocks and not using a sensible font, make it stop...

I did the same, best offer of £50 accepted!

I am using Cacti to graph useful information about my server at home.

Fan speed control is actually done in hardware by my Motherboard (an Abit something with a uGuru chip). Temperature monitoring should in theory be a piece of cake in Linux with an lm_sensors compatible motherboard.

For those who don't know, Cacti is a front end to the RRDTOOL I mentioned earlier. RRDTOOL was developed by the same guys who did MRTG, when the decided that MRTG's design was too limited for general graphing.

I'll probably give Cacti a go when I get my new server up and running fully. I'll still need my shell scripts however to gather data from things like my temperature board.

Thanks Julf !

The problem is that I use sed about once a year, so I never actually completely grasp how to do stuff like that. It can be so frustrating knowing there is a better way to do things but not being able to work out how to do it...

While we are talking about sed, what would be the "right" way to extract both the "DS Margin" and "DS Line Attenuation" values from this input:

Code:

---

        DS Line Attenuation:    40      DS Margin:              8

---

So far I have:

Code:

---

cut -d: -f3 | sed -e "s/ *//"

---

Which gets me the margin value, but I am stuggling to separate out the attenuation value.

Hmmm, the \n doesn't give me a newline, it just outputs "n". Perhaps it is because I have a very old copy of sed (this box is still on RedHat 7.1).