RE: qmail publicfile : need advice

Hi Payal,
No doubt you'll have seen all the different options and all the
different options. To further confuse things, I'm going to chip in with
my $0.02.

As it's a non-profit project, I'd imagine that you'd want administration
overhead to be minimal. This presents several questions (assuming you're
going ahead with Mandrake or RedHat, like you said in your e-mail):

Who has to administrate it? It might be easier for someone to use
Mandrake than RedHat if they don't understand Linux. If someone else can
admin the box instead of you, then it makes your life easier.

If you go RedHat, can the school afford RedHat network subscriptions -
yes, there are alternatives but if you're using frpm and it breaks
something then you have to sort it out. At least with RHN, there's some
degree of 'official' accountability if things fall over (not saying that
mailing lists are bad, just that it might make the school admins feel
'safer' about things with RH managing it).

Once the auto-update part has been sorted out then you can use standard
rpms from the RH/Mandrake archives (Mandrake comes with loads of stuff,
mostly useless - but some useful things) and RPMS from places like
freshrpms.net and maintain the ability to auto-update them using things
like apt-get for freshrpms. (Freshrpms is designed for RH users though,
bear that in mind).

You could actually use things like <spit> Apache </spit> on these
systems, and it should auto update. RPM will back up your old config if
it feels like replacing it, so it's a matter of copying it back over
then restarting the service.

I'd advise against using any ftpd at all. It's an extra service, the
same functionality can be provided via scp - there's a really good tool
called winscp, available from http://winscp.vse.cz/eng/ and if you check
freshmeat for an awkward, but damned useful once it's running tool
called scponly you don't need to give people full shell access to the
box in order to use it. Winscp doesn't even require sftp, and has a nice
'Norton Commander'-like interface that a 5 year old could get the hang
of.

Finally, some kind of filtering on nasty ports (e.g anything that isn't
explicitly allowed, but particularly 111, 6000, and anything your window
manager might use) should help protect against anything the admins might
accidentally do (apart from removing the filtering, of course).

I apologise for the rest of the list for being so Off-Topic, but Payal
asked, and this is just my $0.02, I've been in a similar situation
several times and although 99% of the above advice flys in the face of
the usual fanaticism I have about hardening systems, at the end of the
day the school isn't paying for it, they probably won't pay for someone
skilled enough to understand how a shell works, how tar works, how to cd
into a directory and do make setup check, or how ln works (even I get
the order wrong quite regularly, but explaining the concepts to some
people can be quite difficult).

Bottom line - My mother can admin a Mandrake box. I wouldn't force
publicfile on her, she'd be ringing me up every day complaining about it
not having a gui.

Looking at the above, I firmly believe I'm going to security hell in a
handbasket, but the simplest solutions are often the best, even if they
aren't the most secure.

Hope this helps, if you want to discuss this further please feel free to
e-mail me.

Regards,
Steve