On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 01:50:11PM -0600, David Blevins wrote:
> I have a new machine which will serve as my gateway/firewall plus a
> ton more.

Conventional wisdom would really recommend using a separate box, running
only a minimal number of services, as the gateway/firewall.  The last
thing you want is for someone to hack into your firewall machine.  The
more services it's running, the more vulnerable it is.

You might also want to consider putting 3 NICs in the firewall and
moving your "bastion host" web/email/whatever servers onto a separate
network from your internal machines.

> What would be a good way to partition up my 80 gig RAID (two 40 gigs) so
> that everything runs optimally, has enough space and can be backed-up?

Opinions vary on partitioning strategies.  Some options are:

- one big partition
- separate partitions for /usr, /usr/local, /home, /var, /tmp ...

There are tradeoffs involved.  Using separate partitions for /var and
/tmp insures that activity on those partitions (such as log files)
doesn't fill up the entire hard disk.  It may be possible to mount the
/usr partition read-only.  Different partitions may have different
backup requirements ...

Joel