Running a web server and a media server

[diggƒreak]

I'm about to begin my second year of University, and I just experienced a catastrophic disk failure which is inspiring me to restructure my data storage life. I plan on having a centralized server for media and games, with my primary desktop, laptop and media center either mounting remote volumes for media or in the case of Windows games, having one or two games installed at a time. These daily use machines will have small drives (~80GB) with a non-RAID incremental backup system in place. The media server will run a similar non-RAID backup system (I'm not interested in RAID at this time as I've had some traumatic experiences attempting to rebuild what was apparently a RAID 1 array).

I currently run a small web server, but I have the feeling that I don't want to use an Internet facing server to hold all my most precious data. This is why I plan on having four machines to start. A web server. A media server. A media center at the TV. A laptop.

I run Arch Linux on my web server and plan on running it on the media server as well.

I'll setup the media server with iptables to only allow connections from my media center and laptop, to prevent access from the web server if I forget to patch a major exploit some day. I've heard that this can also be prevented if I run a three router setup, with a "master" router and two "subordinate" routers, whose subnets have no possibility of communication. (any insight on this?)

As I said, I won't be running RAID, so I'll have known volumes that only contain a certain type of media.

- To breakdown the drives -
Web server:
80GB Western Digital (currently have)
160GB Other Brand (for backup, need to buy)

Media Server:
1TB Hitachi (Media Type 1 and 2, currently have)
1.5TB Other Brand (backup of Hitachi, need to buy)
1TB Western Digital (Media Type 3, currently have)
1.5TB Other Brand (backup of Western Digital, need to buy)

Media Center:
160GB Samsung (currently have)
320GB Western Digital (for backup, currently have)

Laptop (drive recently failed, lost a lot of data):
80GB Some Brand (need to buy)
160GB Other Brand (for backup, need to buy for use with this which I have)

I'll mount the drives on the media server as needed over SFTP.

A few questions.
How does my plan sound in terms of security?
Does Windows support mounting drives as logical volumes over SSH/SFTP?
What's the best incremental backup system for what I'm trying to do on Linux?

 

[pjkenned]

I would highly suggest just running a virtualized environment for at minimum the web server and media server. It is usually cheaper to run one machine versus 2, even if you need to add an additional NIC. You are adding a ton of hardware in there that you really don't need these days. ESXi/ VirtualBox and you will be fine.

 

[Shockey]

From my understanding your wanting to backup to second drive in the same computer.

What if you have a natural disaster then your entire data on that system is wiped out?

Maybe go a step further to achieve a better backup plan. Have two copies of your data in different places. Backup Drive A in laptop to Drive B(laptop drive) and also to your Media Server drive A. Do the same with the web server. Same with media center also. Skipped that one first time

Then on your media server your already planning to backup drive A (Hitachi) to drive B(other brand) and then drive C(Western Digital) to drive D(other brand)

You will have 3 copies of your data on different hard drives if you do this.
So you can lose two hard drives on any computer and still have a copy.


EDIT: This is if you don't take the suggestion above and virtualize.

You could try an online backup service for your sensitive data.

 

[diggƒreak]

I would highly suggest just running a virtualized environment for at minimum the web server and media server. It is usually cheaper to run one machine versus 2, even if you need to add an additional NIC. You are adding a ton of hardware in there that you really don't need these days. ESXi/ VirtualBox and you will be fine.

Ok, if I want to go with VirtualBox then does it make sense to run the web server as the only virtual machine on top of my media server? I'm still not crazy about the idea of running a public website on the same machine that houses all of my media.

From my understanding your wanting to backup to second drive in the same computer.

What if you have a natural disaster then your entire data on that system is wiped out?

Maybe go a step further to achieve a better backup plan. Have two copies of your data in different places.

Yes, offsite backup is always the best, and in the case of my laptop I'll be using an external drive bay (linked above). So if I lose my laptop I'll still have my data. And extremely sensitive files (projects that I'm working on etc.) I'll store on one of the paired drives on the media server.

 

[Jesse B]

The Virtual Machine will not grant access to the host; it runs completely independent, assuming you haven't configured it otherwise.