While I should wait till returning to work on Monday, this is a thread
of great relevance to either my current work and home setup or where I
intend taking it - and in some cases learning how! I have been very
interested in Chris and Steve's replies and as time allows over coming
weeks will be asking a question or 3 on the list!
At work we have a similar number of users to John though all windows
users (apart from me). I don't currently have a complete set of answers
to what can be accomplished on SBS, but have made a start. This is what
I have so far.
I have an ipcop firewall box, just a standard install plus the snort IDS
added. It just works.
I have another box running linux functioning as both a file server and
running vmware server. Yes, I know this isn't ideal and they should be
separate boxes but with the limited resources available to me (like many
small businesses) is all I can do. It works.
3 hard drives in this box, one for the OS, the other 2 set up as raid1,
created 2 partitions for data and backups, then samba and a few chown +
chmod commands is all I needed. Cron runs bash scripts each night for
backups which also copy to another machine. Same script also burns some
backups to DVD. The only user data I don't currently have on this
server are some large Outlook pst files - given their size I prefer to
have them on the user's local machine. They are however backed up (with
a different script). Those using Thunderbird for email have those files
on the file server.
I have VMWare Server running an XP guest so that (a) can continue to
make frequent use of a particular colour printer we have (no linux
support for this model) and (b) run the management console for Symantec
End Point Protection (is like the big brother to Norton Internet
Security). I could also either use RDP or VMWare Server console to
connect to it to use any windows-only software I need to use from time
to time.
I can actually run a second VM at the same time and have no noticeable
(from user's perspective) performance hit - is a 64 bit dual core (I
forget the speed) and 4 gig of ram,
On my list to do or find out about or learn when the holiday is over:
- orange network on the ipcop box for the wireless network.
- rsync script for off-machine backups of changed files through the day
- postfix / sendmail (I have no idea about specifics at this point) /
imap email (and remotely)
- OpenVPN for remote access
- central management of users?
Some of these things I would like to have working at home, and think
many others would too. In fact I may well test one or 2 of these out at
home first as it's less of a problem if I totally break something here!
Cheers,
Roger
John Hyde wrote:
Anyone using linux and open-source software to run a small business set-up ?
We currently have 7 users connecting to a Microsoft small business server.
This gives us what we need for:
+ sharing files (word processed documents, pdfs, etc)
+ getting emails from outside
+ sending emails to outside
+ saving the emails and backing them up
+ sending internal emails
+ connecting to the internet for web surfing
There's probably a few other things it does as well.
We run a mix of windows PCs and Macs - and probably always will do for our
workstations.
It often goes wrong and simple tasks like adding a new user seem to be
difficult (or easy to do incorrectly). There is also a price tag for all
this stuff - although the cost of learning about stuff and time spent
fiddling with stuff usually dwarfs any external paid costs.
What would a linux / open source set-up look like and is anybody actually
using such a set-up ?
Regards,
John Hyde
