E-Smith was something brought up quite a bit back in the old days of Clug but hasn't been mentioned recently so I thought I would remind and also share some of my recent experiences with it. (Before someone asks I'm not being paid for this I just really like the product)
First off the URLS: http://www.e-smith.org/ (developer website -free version) http://linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=13 (linux ISO has downloads) E-Smith is a Linux distro that is indended for small company / personal network servers. It's a simple canned RH7.3 based distro that includes a the following: - SMTP server (uses qmail) - POP3 / IMAP (with SSL I believe) - HTTP (Apache with SSL and PHP) - Samba - Mac equivalent to Samba - FTP - Backups (to tape or local machine) - NAT - SQUID (supports transparent proxy - this is really nifty!) - LDAP (for local users, company can use for addressbook) - DHCP - SSH - PPTP (I haven't tested this since my company firewall is blocking GRE packets) E-Smith is supported by a company called Mitel that is making money off supporting it. Commercial users get a automatic security update installing tool. Non-commercial users have to do it themselves by downloading the RPMS off their website and installing them (fairly easy anyways). There are lots of contributed RPMS for the system that provide things like SpamAssassin plugged into QMail, procmail, squid filtering, port forwarding, ... The install is simply a matter of having an empty machine with 64Mb+ of RAM and popping the CDROM in. You answer a few questions (very, very simple stuff like your domain name, wether to provide NAT, etc) and voila a server. You don't have to choose drives or make partitions. It does that for you under the assumption that this thing is a dedicated server and the drives are for it's sole use. The rest of the configuration is done through a fairly decent web based interface. You can setup users, file shares (called iBays, more on that later), groups, mail accounts, service availability (public/private), monitor logs, virtual hosts, printers, samba, quotas, etc. Pretty well everything you could want on a small workgroup server. E-smith has this nifty feature called iBays. Basically they are file shares that can be accessed through Samba (you can limit who can access them), FTP, AppleTalk, and the Web (pick and choose which of these you want. not everything should have ftp/web access :). For example if I was working on a website for a client I can make an ibay called foobar. I then would have a network share (through samba/appletalk) I can connect to on my local network and use. I can also, if enabled, connect via FTP and maintain the content. Also each iBay has a public section that is served by apache (can be password protected). So my client can conenct to http://server.com/foobar and see my work in progress. I think this is a fairly neat feature and it's really easy to setup. I installed it on another machine at home and setup it up to accept all of my personal e-mail. Unfortunately I get a lot of spam so I downloaded some contrib RPMS for procmail and spamassassin and installed them. I just go back in the control panel (both rpms added appropriate configuration sections in the admin tool) and turned them on. Configured hwo sensitive I wanted the SPAM filters and voila. I find the admin interface is rather pokey (perl cgi's) and any changes often take 30sec or so to make (on my k62550 / 512M ram) but so far I haven't encountered any problems. And if you need to make changes that are not supported by the admin interface you can do it fairly easily. All the config files that e-smith touches are controlled by template scripts. You can add your own stuff to custom template scripts and ask e-smith to generate that file. Any other times e-smith needs to change it, it will incorporate your changes too. It's rather slick! Anyways. I just wanted to share how impressed I was with the package. It seems quite solid and is certainly a lot simpler to setup as a workgroup server than installing a normal distro and doing all this stuff oneself. If anyone would like copies and can't download the ISO let me know and I'll bring copies to the next mtg. Jeff -- Jeffrey Clement GPG Signature: 2956 42A8 ED8A 91F4 8CE0 A5DF 5293 8E10 6F08 7FB9 Website : http://jclement.ca
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