Building my own cloud

[altecXP]

So I have an older Macbook Pro( 2.4GHz C2D and 4GB 667MHz DDR2) that I plan to attach a 2x 2TB RAID1 via FW800 and using OS X Server 10.6(via my Dev connection) to set up my own cloud.


What I mean by that is an FTP server that I can mount from my main laptop anywhere I am, a light HTTP server so I can have Xmarks store my bookmarks on my own server, and a small blog, maybe email in the future.

Does anyone have any good guides for how to configure FTP, Web and SSH in a secure way? I am familiar with using Terminal, and editing config files, I've just never used OS X Server before.

 

[Detrius]

If you're interested in security, then first step: don't do FTP. SSH gets you all of the secure file transfer capabilities you need.

Next, this isn't a "cloud." You're just talking about setting up one server (and primarily a file server at that). If you're doing searches on how to set up your own cloud, you aren't going to find anything, because if you have to ask, you aren't qualified. I'm an Apple Certified System Administrator, and I'm not qualified.

Apple has server admin guides posted on their website. If you really want to understand OS X Server, that's where you should start. They cover everything.

 

[CloudMac.net]

I agree with Detrius. FTP is insecure and not preferred for file transfer on data you care about.

To get started, you could look into Rumpus. This software supports HTTPS file transfers as well as FTP.

http://www.maxum.com/Rumpus/

We're not running this in production, but know of companies who used it with success.

 

[ChrisA]

Does anyone have any good guides for how to configure FTP, Web and SSH in a secure way? I am familiar with using Terminal, and editing config files, I've just never used OS X Server before.

First off this is not a "Cloud" it is a simple file and web server. If you are interested in security then use a VPN. This is an encrypted "tunnel" that exteneds you home network over the internet.

When it comes to setting this up Mac OS X is not different from Linux or BSD. In fact I'm wondering why you'd use such a valuable computer as a Mac Pro. A $200 atom powered PC is better. The cost of the owner to run a Mac Pro 24x7 is non-trivial. You don't need CPU speed because the bottle neck in performance will by your Internet connection, even with my fiber optic connection the little Atom powered Linux server runs idle even when pushing data.

 

[mrbash]

With the "cloud" bit out of the way, what you want is a volume that you can mount from anywhere.

Your best bet is to tunnel AFP over ssh. This is fairly straight forward. You just open up a local SSH tunnel to your server and mount over that.

1. Get a domain or static IP address for your server.
2. Get SSH running correctly on your server.
3. Get AFP correctly mounting on your server.
4. On your local machine open an ssh tunnel:
ssh -L <localport>:localhost:548 -f -N username@<domain_or_ip_of_server>
5. Mount the AFP volume:
open afp://localhost:<localport>

That should do it.