{"id":205,"date":"2007-11-05T19:52:45","date_gmt":"2007-11-05T19:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=205"},"modified":"2008-02-08T01:43:16","modified_gmt":"2008-02-08T01:43:16","slug":"it-infrastructure-for-a-growing-charity-revisited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=205","title":{"rendered":"I.T. infrastructure for a growing charity… revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

I blogged back in the summer<\/a> when I was starting to think about overhauling the I.T. infrastructure for my youth charity, Solent Youth Action<\/a>. But I never actually came back to this to say what I went with in the end. <\/p>\n

You can see the original post<\/a> to see what we started with, but in short, it was fairly primitive. <\/p>\n

I don’t think that we’re really finished yet, but here is where I’ve got to so far… <\/p>\n

The network is built around a new Linux fileserver, running CentOS<\/a>. It has three hard-drives, and uses RAID 5<\/a> (striped RAID with the parity spread across the drives) to protect against hardware failures. <\/p>\n

I use Sentry Tools<\/a> to monitor the system logs and email me if anything looks like it might start going wrong.<\/p>\n

A directory is shared to the local network using samba<\/a>, making it available as a central file server for the ten Windows XP workstations that we have. Backup for this storage is still manual – writing to a removable USB hard-drive every month, which remains disconnected from the server and locked up the rest of the time. (I have set up a cron<\/a> job on the server to email a reminder to the administrator to do the backup.) <\/p>\n

I’m still looking into off-site backup, but haven’t got round to this yet. I hear a lot of good things about Amazon S3<\/a> but don’t know much about how it works in practice.<\/i><\/p>\n

The critical information – personal information about young people and their volunteering activity records – has been moved to an off-site server, and is now hosted in a drupal content management system<\/a> installation using CiviCRM relationship management<\/a> on a 1and1 server<\/a>. A cron job on our local CentOS fileserver sucks down a local copy of the MySQL database<\/a> behind this as an additional backup. <\/p>\n

Remote access to workstations is now available using Windows Remote Desktop<\/a>. The workstations are not exposed in front of our NAT router<\/a>, so this is done using putty<\/a> to open an SSH connection<\/a> to the Linux server, with putty’s SSH Tunnels settings port forwarding on to the Windows desktops. SSH access is limited to SSH-2, and password authentication is disabled in favour of key-based authentication using PuTTYgen<\/a> to generate keys.<\/p>\n

To make remote access easier, the staff have USB keys with PortableApps<\/a> on it with apps to allow remote work. The office doesn’t have a static IP address, so I’m using a free dynamic DNS service from no-ip.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I also took advantage of the time to work on our computers to make sure that all of our workstations are protected with AVG Anti-Virus<\/a>, and the anti-spyware security utilities Spyware Doctor<\/a> and Norton Security Scan<\/a> that you can get for free in Google Pack<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I’m thinking about getting the Linux fileserver to perform some virus \/ spyware checks on the documents stored in the samba share, but haven’t really found a suitable Linux tool for this yet.<\/i><\/p>\n

There we go. It’s all fairly standard stuff so I haven’t bothered to give too much detail on how I did this, but at the very least, this post was a good chance to give some link-love to the fantastic free and open-source tools that I’ve used to put the whole thing together. The quality of stuff that is available for free never ceases to amaze me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I blogged back in the summer when I was starting to think about overhauling the I.T. infrastructure for my youth charity, Solent Youth Action. But I never actually came back to this to say what I went with in the end. You can see the original post to see what we started with, but in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[106,108,104,103,102,17,105,109,63,107,88],"class_list":["post-205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charity","category-tech","tag-1and1","tag-avg","tag-civicrm","tag-drupal","tag-dynamic-dns","tag-linux","tag-mysql","tag-norton","tag-portableapps","tag-putty","tag-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}