Alternative to MS offerings;

[Novexx]

First of all, this may not be the correct place for this query - please let me know where is, if it isn't.

Anyways, I currently have 8 XP Pro PCs running on a peer to peer network & the time has come to start considering moving this onto a client / server setup. I have had a look at some of the regular offerings from the likes of MS & Dell, but between hardware & software I am already figuring the price is going to way surpass what funds are available.

I have never used Linux or open source stuff in the past, always going down the regular routes, but now find myself looking for some reliable hardware & software to get some sort of cost effective solution.

All I really need is something that can store & server user identities/settings, serve documents, serve a couple of multi user application databases & distribute external & internal mail.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[IPGuru]

Sounds like any Linux distro would be suitable
SAMBA is used to provide Windows shares, LDAP can be used to controll user logins, mysql sor similar should be more than enough for your database needs & mail server support is not an issue.

when it comes to chousing which distro you will probably get as meny suggestions as there are useres here.

if you want support then Debian or red hat are the biggest options, but support does cost
alternativly Cent OS is a free redistribution of Redhat Enterprise & there are may other options out there that are more than capable.

For example my home pc is running Fedora, uses DNSMASQ to provide DHCP & DNS services, SAMBA to provide network storage & printers services to the GF's Windoze box fetchmail to get email from my ISP, Dovecote to makeit available via Imap to any pc on the network & squirelmail to provide webmail access when I am not at home.

 

[pentode]

We have similar network, with about 8 Windows XP/Vista machines, and several network printers.

We replaced our old Windows 2000 server about 18 months ago with a new box running Debian Linux. The server is configured as a standalone server in Samba - no Active Directory. We use the Linux CUPS system as a print server. All company-related data is kept on this server and accessed via our network.

I think it has worked out well. The system has been much more reliable than the Windows 2000 Server, and much less expensive. I think our "uptime" is about 350 days right now. We use rsnapshot to backup the server files to a USB drive and I run rsnapshot remotely from another Linux machine at home to back up our critical data to another USB drive.

It wasn't painless and isn't perfect, but I think I spend less time on this system than I did on the Windows server. And is certainly has been much less expensive.

 

[Novexx]

Appreciated.

Can anyone advise anywhere on

http://www where

I can find out a bit more on this sort of stuff. I Manage fine with everything we have on peer to peer, shared applications, network printers, print servers, DVR with web server....., but I dont know a whole lot about servers & little on Linux. I dont want complicated overkill, just something to do the job in hand - like said mainly serve user profiles & distribute mail on the internal side. some sort of newbie-ish server guide.

Thanks.

 

[pentode]

You might start here:

http://www.aboutdebian.com/

There are a lot of resources on using Linux servers. For use in a Windows environment, search for "samba servers" or something similar. The documentation for Samba at

http://www.samba.org

is pretty good as well.

If your users share files that you care about, there are a lot of advantages to using a file server over a peer-to-peer network.

 

[goBoating]

Get any old PC hardware and throw the latest debian or centos release on it. Just accept the defaults as it installs. It will create a root (God) account as it installs and I think it will prompt you to create the first 'user' account. When asked, tell the installer to install everything. This won't be what you want in a production situation, but, it will give you a lot of tools/opportunities to experiment with things like databases and web servers and such. In about an hour, you'll have a Linux machine to play on.

Then, do things like create, modify, delete some regular users. Set up a SAMBA share and map a drive to it from a Windoze PC. Figure out how to start stop MySQL and/or PostgresSQL. Install pgAdmin to use as an interface to the PostgreSQL instance (works pretty darn well). Etc.....

If you have a little time to play with it before you have to make the jump, you can gain some familiarity with it and make a better educated decision (guess) as to how to move forward.






'hope this helps

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