server questions

[Andrew Gould]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 11:32 AM, Bruce Marshall <bmarsh at bmarsh.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, May 12, 2011, Yu Meng Chong wrote:
>> Anyway, let us know how the Zotac box performs! I heard some awful
>> stuff about Intel Atoms, and that the cooling still requires a CPU
>> fan. But I am very curious to know if it is capable enough to be a
>> server of any kind!
>
> I'm running an Atom box (1.80Ghz,  4GB quad cpu)   as an email, spam, and
> firewall server and main server to my internet connection.   Haven't seen any
> problems with it at all, and I know that Spamassassin takes quite a bit of
> cycles.   Before that I ran  an Atom  1.6Ghz, 2GB,  dual cpu and the
> performance as a server was the same.  Both boxes have a small cpu fan.
>
> BTW, I use shorewall as a firewall and it is pretty easy to make it do what I
> want and therefore,  I haven't bothered to dig into iptables all that much.
> _______________________________________________

My chief concern with iptables is learning how to deal with brute
force attacks on the ssh port.  In PF you can write rules that will
blacklist an ip address after a specified rate of connection attempts
(5 attempts in 3 seconds, for example).  I could change the ssh port,
of course, but then I'd have to find another open port through my
employer's firewall  (port 16 is blocked).

Andrew