Newbie with LOTS of questions...

[tomc]

I am an American, living and teaching in China. I have been here for many years, and because of this, have been conditioned to computers doing strange things...but no more! I have read a little bit about security and networks and am really fascinated by it. Also, I will be putting up some forums in the near future and plan to begin a business online teaching English. I subscribe to a webhosting service (linux based) and am trying to protect the resources on the host as well as the communications between my computer and others. Here are the tools I have to work with:
dedicate IP address; ssl certificates; pgp keys; directories can be password protected; SSH/Shell; maybe there are more tools there..but I don't know about them. In the near future, I would like to set up a computer in my home as a simple server and let the computers that I use in the school access it daily, to get data but also to write data to it. At night, I want this server to back up data to my host. This is my first project I also need to buy a new router and am looking at how to make that piece of hardware work for me in my attempts to keep things safe.

[Shay]

Have many computers at the school?
Thinking you want to check out a VPN capable router.
Set it up and have the school computers use VPN to access your server.

Keep a list of what you upload and a backup of everything uploaded.

Sometimes deleting everything on the server and reloading is the easiest and fastest way to fix a hacked server. Backups are good on top of that.

[tomc]

Thanks! The computer sent my post before I could finish it. The second part of the post: I would like to learn about these things rather than just get answers to questions...about communications protocols, etc so that I can keep abreast of new developments in inter and intra net issues. Can someone suggest some websites, books and periodicals to read?

[Shay]

This is where I would start.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/C/comm..._protocol.html

Once we get the definition down, while waiting for more posts on the 2nd question might help out. Those are things I take for granted and have not studied.