The server's nature isn't totally important but you can think of it along the lines of a twitter server. It gets messages from one place, collates them, and sends them to (potentially many) other places. I suppose it could be used directly as a "twitter server" but of course, they already have those and my start up focus is rather orthogonal to that.

You can download Istanbul from here. Debian and Fedora users should be able to install it from the repo. Istanbul has a very simple interface (or lack of). When you first start up Istanbul, you will see a small red button on your desktop panel.

s a text based firewall that works with  iptables.  UFW is designed to be an easier way to manage a firewall from the command line.  Whether this is easier than learning iptables or not, you can decide.  But UFW comes partially set up when you install Ubuntu.  Now it is not activated by default so you have not protection but some basic settings are in place when you do start up UFW.

you should have already created a subversion user and group, now let’s get svn running