Daphne is my primary server.

Hardware

The entire system was assembled in 2001 as a workstation, which eventually became my server when computing demands increased.

The motherboard is an ASUS somethingorother with an ALi M1647 chipset. The MB has no onboard video, sound, or ethernet, owing to its vintage.

The CPU is an AMD Duron 900. The machine has 512MB of RAM, and two IDE HDDs. The first, a Western Digital 80GB, contains the main OS, and most of the file storage. The second drive, a Maxtor 30GB, is used exclusively for my collection of ISOs.

Video output is provided by a Matrox Mystique PCI VGA card. The machine originally had a GeForce 2MX 400 in the AGP slot, but I pulled this out when Daphne was repurposed as a server. I acutally wanted to run without a video card at all, and direct the console to the serial port, but the workstation-class BIOS will not boot without some kind of video card attached.

Operating System

The machine ostensibly runs Debian Etch, but some packages are taken from Debian Testing or Debian Unstable, so satisfy my desire to not run software that is two years out of date.

Roles

Router/Firewall/Traffic shaper

Routing and packet filtering are handled well by the stuff built into the Linux kernel. I used a hand-rolled iptables ruleset, and a hand-rolled script that uses tc to set up the traffic shaping configuration. I use the traffic shaping to regulate throughput so as not to fill the caches on my cable modem.

Web Server

At the core of my web serving lies Apache. On top of that, Drupal drives my website, and Gallery organizes my photo collection.

Mail Server

I've replaced the Debian stock Exim with Postfix, and use that to handle all my incoming and outgoing mail. I can pick up my mail using IMAP over SSL with Courier-IMAP. Outgoing mail is routed through my ISP's mail relay by Postfix so that I don't look like a spammer. Postfix is configured to allow TLS on the SMTP session, and to provide authentication through SASL, so that I can identify myself to my mailserver and relay mail through it from anywhere. Unauthenticated users cannot relay unless they're on my local network.

File Server

Daphne has Samba installed to provide file sharing services to both Windows and UNIX clients. It is configured as a domain controller, with an LDAP backend for authentication. I did this in order to learn the mechanism I eventually used at work to set up our Samba domain there.

Print Server

CUPS is installed so that Windows machines can print to my networked printer. Browsing is enabled so that Linux machines can automatically see the printer.

DB Server

Drupal and Gallery both require a database backend; in this case I'm using MySQL.