On Wed, 2003-08-06 at 00:53, Shane Hollis wrote: > Has anyone had any experiences with the E-Smith server application system? > ( http://www.e-smith.org ) > I am going to be trialing it at home but am interested in any horror / happy > stories.
Hi Shane, I trialled e-smith version 4.1.2 (based on RH 7.0 IRC) a couple of years ago - it's probably changed (improved hopefully) since then. Back then, it was very easy to install and configure, plus everything I tried worked as advertised. It's probably a good solution if the out-of-box features suit your requirements. On the other hand, I found it more work to customise than a standard redhat distro since customisation typically required editing various template files used to support the admin interface instead of your usual config files. I also needed to update the version of samba provided with to provide windoze PDC support, the newer release was relocated in the file system so I had to setup various sym links to allow the e-smith admin interface to continue working. It's really a turnkey solution and is probably not aimed at users who want to do muck around too much. In the end (after two weeks of use) I replaced e-smith with a standard redhat distro, but I did carry across some of the things I liked about e-smith. In particular, I still use qmail and courier-imap for my mail server on top of redhat 7.3. HTH
