Running multiple services on a home server

Question

I have this old laptop, but the battery and power adapter are basically shot. Works great as long as it´s not mobile. Anyway it´s now going to be my home server.

I´ve got xubuntu 12.04LTS installed, but before I start configuring this thing any deeper I wanted to get some opinions from people more knowledgeable about this stuff than I. My main question is about running multiple services. I would like to use this as a NAS, and Minecraft server for sure. Possibly LAMP as well if I decide to put together a family home page etc.

Normally I would just chuck everything on a screen and call it a day, but with the Minecraft server I will occasionally be having in-laws and friends connect from OUTSIDE the lan, which obviously poses a concern for priv escalation and data integrity.

In preparing to get all this running should I create a different user for each of these services with each user running it´s own screen? Should I use some level of emulation or service segregation like LXC? Or am I over complicating this?

From a firewall perspective I´m good. NAT is setup correctly and will forward the traffic as expected. The server itself is whitelisted (or will be). But from a Linux perspective I´m still too green to know if I´ve covered my bases.

Answer 1

Each server will run as it's own user by default. So for example, Apache (and other web servers) run as www-data.

In general you should be good to go, but you can read about hardening each server. In addition I would use apparmor. Most if not all servers in the repositories should have an apparmor profile already.

Other then that, you would need to ask a specific question about a specific server.

My only other piece of advice is to isolate the server on your LAN. Specifically I use iptables on my LAN to reject packets from the server local IP.