Hi all. I just have a couple of questions .. First, I have been using Trustix for about 4 years now, and I have always used the ISOs that I download from http://www.linuxiso.org .. Anyway, the versions that I have always gotten here, are strictly shell servers (no gui), and I am comfortable in a shell envoronment and pride myself on being able to do MOST of my Linux network service administration without any GUI. Anyway, about a year or so ago, I started finding links to sites that had Trustix advertised as some kind of graphical wyswyg distro. Apparently these graphical Trustix distros are highly thought of, and are available for a substantial sum of money. What I want to know, is what exactly are the technical differences between the raw shell servers that I am using (free for download), and the graphical ones that I am seeing advertised of late? Are these simply the same Trustix shell distros undernieth that I use but with some special adaptation of gnome or kde running on top of it, or is this something very different? Have any packages been added or patched beyond what I am using? Are they any different at all from what I am using, or is the GUI just a fancy and convenient way of doing what my distros can do? Feel free to treat these questions as thoroughly as you want to - I want to know all about these graphical distros and what (if anything) makes them different undernieth from the free shell server versions. Also, one of the things that I read about the graphical Trustix releases, is that apparently VPN (as well as other functions) can be deployed simply by dragging and dropping and connecting the various elements as desired in the GUI, and thus the firewall rules and other configuration parameters are updated to match the graphical representation, etc.
Which leads me to my next question: Okay - I have ample experience administrating services such as Apache, Samba, NFS, NIS, DHCP, etc.. But one thing I have been trying to do and have never actually gotten working, is VPN .. I usually start reading the various documentation such as that found on http://www.linuxdoc.org, or even some of the documentation that comes with Trustix. I always like to start from the beginning so that I do not miss anything important. I read all about the different kinds of VPN, their advantages and disadvantages, etc. The text is dry and arduous enough to begin with, but to make things worse, my busy schedule interrupts me and then usually a lot of time goes by and I don't get to finish, and then I loose my train of thought and therefore I ultimately wind up having to start over. I have been through this vicious cycle now for about 3 years, and I am simply frustrated. What I want to know, is weather or not this group can help me by walking me though the deployment of my first VPN. If I can get some simple directions to get it running the way I want to, it will go a long way in helping me understand what I have read. There is a big difference between knowing the path and walking it. I have never walked it, and this makes it harder to understand the documentation. Can I get help in this forum to get this done? Though you might consider me to be an intermediate to advanced shell server admin, after all this time I am still a newbie where it comes to VPN and deploying it. Some of the features that I am wanting and needing for my VPN are listed below: 1) My server at work has an NFS shared partition available to the network there. I need to be able to mount this NFS share to my Linux machine at home, 2) Users have files on their computers at the office, and yes - we are using network neighborhood. When a user logs on from home, they want to be able to go to their network neighborhood on their computer at home, and see their computer that is at work. (I know a lot of people who use TightVNC, but I think it is tacky. I want to use IPSec or some kind of Linux VPN and do it right). 3) We have multiple office locations, and what my co-workers would like to be able to do is this: They want to be able to save a document to a folder on their desktop on their computer at one office location, and have that document appear in that same folder on another computer at a completely different office location. (likely what they will be doing, is saving it to a SMB shared folder on the main server at the main office, and then VPN will tunnel Samba shares to the remote office location and there the file share will become available through network neighborhood to users at the remote location. 4) Finally, users who travel in their job, would like to be able to log on from a completely remote network (such as a hotel for example), and have their laptop computers acquire an IP address on the same 192.168.0.* network as their office, and have all of our main office's network resources available to them as if they were in the same building with the main server. This isn't as urgent as the other features, but it sure would be nice to have. I realize that there is a lot to do to make all of these happen, but if we could just take them one step at a time, we could eventually get it done. I sure do need help with this, and I know if I don't get some help, it will never happen. And I don't know of anywhere that I could get more qualified help with this than from this forum, as this is the forum for Trustix. Thanks for any and all help, Jim Butler _______________________________________________ tsl-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.trustix.org/mailman/listinfo/tsl-discuss
