| SERVER & NETWORKING WITH LINUX |
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Linux is famous for its robustness. GNU/Linux has proved to be superior in numerous benchmarks and real life conditions around the world. Our personal experience with Linux has been fantastic. Linux will simply not let you down! For most requirements, Linux will outright win the battle of a server OS.
If you are setting up a LAN or are looking forward to enhancements, we strongly encourage you to look at the alternatives Linux provides.
ABC Company is moving ahead in IT implementation. Top level executives are given desktop computers. There is no network yet, we use floppies to transfer files. It should be nice if we could easily share files and printers. We also want to provide email and web access to employees from a single Internet connection.
ABC Company also wants to setup an intranet system to host documents and develop a time tracking and project management system.
The administrator should be able to track user activity and resource utilization. The system should also be secure and outsiders / unauthenticated users should not be able to get any access.
Free and Open Source software paradigm has resulted in a number of key benefits to the software: Reliability, Stability, Scalability, Auditability, Flexibility and Support. Linux fulfills almost all the requirements for ABC Company out of the box! Thus the single best way of achieve the desired goals is to setup a Linux intranet server!
Network Setup
Since ABC Company does not have any network, the first step is to lay down a LAN. 100Mbps network cards and hubs/switches are quite inexpensive these days.
Email
Email can be efficiently handled using Sendmail, Qmail, Postfix or other Linux mail transfer agents. ABC Company can create user accounts for employees and achieve the desired messaging setup. Please refer to the "Messaging with Linux" handout for more on this.
Name Server
A name server will allow ABC Company to setup intranet domains and can also cache DNS requests for faster performance. We recommend BIND or djbdns. BIND is used by about 90% of the name servers on the Internet. If you remove BIND from the world, Internet will be dead!
Web Proxy
Squid will be the right solution for ABC Company. Squid is an efficient caching web proxy. It will not only make Internet available to the intranet from a single connection, but will also allow customizing access privileges for different users. Squid also caches the content to allow faster serving times.
File and Printer Sharing
ABC Company can benefit immensely if the Linux server is used as a central file server. Samba is an effective, stable and low cost solution for file and printer sharing from almost any OS to Microsoft world! Samba is in wide use, and is also believed to outperform Microsoft solutions for file and print sharing. This can also be utilized as a document repository.
Authentication
OpenLDAP is the most popular LDAP server on Linux. We recommend setting up an LDAP directory is for centralized user authentication and resource management.
Intranet and Groupware
Apache is by far the best and most popular web server in the world. Many high profile sites use Apache, and it works great even in an Intranet. MySQL and PostgreSQL are two popular database servers. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (the number one web scripting language) can be used to develop the time tracking and project management systems. This technology combination is actually a very popular web application development environment.
There are many ready groupware solutions too, and we can implement one that meets the exact needs.
Security
ABC Company needs a good security system. Apart from user authentication, we will also setup a firewall with iptables. The admin can be educated about various network analysis tools that allow checking security level of the server.
Tracking and Reporting
There are various tools available to log and report every bit of activity happening on or through a Linux server. We would setup mrtg and Webalizer for the admin along with other system utilities for logging.
Linux is an out of the box solution for most of your network server related requirements. A standard mail, web, proxy, file & print and database server can provide enormous productivity boost to an organization. Linux also runs reliably - you get the freedom to fire and forget!
You do not have to pay any licensing fees for deploying these services too! They come with the operating system and you just need to configure them. Many organizations are running Linux based intranets for similar purposes - benefiting from the efficiency and robustness of OSS/FS, but not having to spend a fortune to get that level of quality.
What can MagNet do?
We could help you at each step! MagNet can setup the LAN and can get you started up quickly. We will take care of the technology so that you can focus on productivity. We have vast experience in setting up Linux servers and can tailor the installation according to your requirements.
This is the right time to go the Linux way! Let us know if you are wondering how Linux can help your business.
Top 10 Myths about Open Source
- It's all about Linux versus Windows, with Red Hat as yet another challenger to Microsoft.
- Open Source Software isn't Reliable or Supported.
- Big companies don't use open source software.
- Open Source is hostile to intellectual property.
- Open Source is all about licenses.
- If I give away my software to the open source community, thousands of developers will suddenly start working for me for nothing.
- Open source only matters to programmers, since most users never look under the hood anyway.
- There's No Money to be Made on Free Software.
- The Open Source movement isn't sustainable, since people will stop developing free software once they see others making lots of money from their efforts.
- Open Source is playing catch up to Microsoft and the commercial world.
-Tim O'Reilly
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