Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

And Konq 3.3 kicks arse too.

Yes it does.

There is actually *another* firewall in front of it in the place of a DSL router/firewall (and the brand/model I have actually is a firewall).

But even if that werent there I would probably stick to this setup to save machines and thus save power.

The machine thats the firewall and fileshare is already on the "inside" but runs iptables as if the DSL internal side is the outside world to it. I do all my port forwards and port blocking and so on from the LINUX machine and then pass it on through the DSL router (which has prett much the default firewall setup from the manufacturer, generic all ports but standard stuff blocked). I generally never have to touch the DSL router (unless I hit a strange port that needs to be tweaked, say to play a game, but then it gets untweaked when done).

Technically I guess its a DMZ type machine but again even if it werent I would still do it on one machine.

I had separate machines at home for several functions, for years, and decided to stop doing that crap to save power.

If the firewall is ever compromised then the intruder will have access to the internal network anyway, sure it would be somewhat safer to have data on a separate machine but ultimately the compromised network could be just as bad.

I have decided (knowingly) that saving power is more important to me than the security of separating the functions.

Also my backup processes burn data to CDs. If the entire machine blows up I can rebuild in a few hours. As for compromise OF the data. Really I dont care about this "data" enough to worry much. Sure its personal files but none have financial info (all online at financial institutions, not local) and none would be very interesting to an intruder, the Christmas letter is great, and all my letters to Congress are fantastic, but just not the sort of stuff I care if anyone gets a hold of. Other stuff includes music files, picture files, so on. I think its fairly well protected anyway, but frankly if it were just public record I wouldnt care. I need the ability to store the data somewhere and have it be reliable (RAID) and backed up much more than I need it to be secure. (In my case.)

np. I didnt take it as grief but as a valid (albeit subtle) point. Its better in situations where you do want real security to have the separate functions physically separate. Thats just not what I need at the house. (Although I did it that way for a long time, I switched as elaborated upon.)

I wrote the above query? Seriously, is this a measurable dollar amount or one of your tree-hugging ideas?

Wait.... you have machines in a rack mount that are not even turned on!!! How does that work? I thought the whole point of putting computers in a rack was so that you could turn off the lights and stare at all the little green, red, orange lights. That and be able to sleep to the pleasant white noise humming. Plus you did not calculate how much you are saving by not having to use your heater as much in that room.

Man that reminds me of Cooper's place when he was next to the park. They had one room full of Glass Front racks and shit. I was drooling to whole time I was there - luckily no one noticed my envy cuz they were all plugged into EverCrack at the time.