On 17/06/2010 09:46, Chuck McManis wrote:
Out of curiosity, lets say you were given the task I've set for myself
which
is described thusly:
Provide a system that gives shell and email service to a dozen users, hosts
perhaps 15 or so mailing lists, provides DNS for 20 - 30 machines.
Preferred OS and what makes it the one you choose?
Preferred MTA and what makes it the one you choose?
Name service?
ssh implementation?
Hardware?
This is probably a good "slashdot asks" question... A million replies
driven by what people are familiar with...
I think you already named all the main software packages, so really bar
some smaller apps (which definitely will work better for certain more
niche projects!) you really have:
- Postfix/Sendmail (and perhaps qmail) for smtp
- Dovecot / Cyrus (and perhaps Courier) for imap
I should think that the real point is the management of all of the
above. Yes any reasonably competent user here can probably manage a one
off server, but managing one "for a friend", ie for very little cost
(perhaps 5 mins a year) will mean a requirement for some management tools
Perhaps someone else can name a bunch of distros which package the above
up with a nice GUI and make a cool integrated system? Obviously at the
larger end you have the Scalix / Open Exchange / SOGO, etc (insert 5
more here) type systems, but all the ones I know of feel a bit bulky for
a small office?
Probably the answer for many is to go hosted..?
What I have is a rails app using ActiveScaffold which manages a fairly
generic database and allows me to very easily manage users across all
servers in a very simple way. Very happy to opensource it if someone
wanted to do some spade work to tidy it up, but really it can be
re-implemented in a few hours by anyone competent with Rails and I'm
very happy to share my DB schema which is really the trick
My system uses:
- Dovecot (changed from Courier some years ago, no experience of Cyrus,
but sounds like a competitor)
- Postfix (never used qmail, used Sendmail in the early 90s and never
ever ever want to see it again (sorry))
- Spamassassin
- P0f
- Clamav
- Fail2ban + simple iptables rules
- Mysql for database, every main app keys into a single schema
- DNSCache for local dnscache on the servers, but found dnsmasq ample
for a home office size setup. DNSmadeeasy.com for domain hosting...
I think without my custom rails app to manage the DB schema it would be
a complete pain to admin, but all it takes is a basic gui to transform
such a bag of bits to something useful...
Good luck
Ed W
