[Gllug] Help Needed for windows to linux migration

[Andrew Halliwell]

And verily, didst =?iso-8859-1?q?kumara=20g?= announce to the hordes:
> 1)what type of firewall is recommended ?

Linux comes with firewalling capabilities built into the kernel.
(IPTables) and there are numerous GUIs out there for configuration of it.

As I use SuSE and YaST to do that though, I'll leave this one for someone
else with more knowledge on the subject of firewall config tools.
  
> 2)is it safe to run the firewall in a linux server
> with connections to both Internet and internal office
> network ?(i.e two network cards in it)

Perfectly safe, very reliable and nicely efficient.

> 3)should i use seperate linux boxes for each mail
> server,DNS server(i dont know i need to setup this
> one),Proxy server,firewall,samba file server ? or is
> it possible for some of these to co exist?

Yes. It's a windows idea that services need to be run on seperate boxes due
to the terribleness of the OS not being able to handle more. Linux is more
than capable of running mail/print/samba/DNS/firewall all on the same box...
(Admittedly, the firewall would be better off on an old outdated box by
itself with another box running the servers for security, but it's perfectly
capable of doing it)
  
> 4)how to setup a email server ? i.e i want to send and
> recive emails for all the users  .I have read of
> send mail/postfix and pop3/imap, will these be enough
> for users to send and recive email from their desktops

Yes. procmail and sendmail are SMTP servers (you just set one of those up and
point the windows mail clients at them... Most people would recommend exim
or postfix over sendmail these days). Pop3 servers are included with
linux too, and again, you just set passwords for your users' accounts and
they point their mail clients at the box.

If you receive mail by SMTP, sendmail or procmail will deal with that too.
If you receive mail from the outside world via pop3 however, you'll need to
setup fetchmail. (Again, quite simple once you've absorbed the instructions)

> 5)Any resources / sugesstions for above set ups ?
>  
> I know these is a one hell of a long request . But can
> anyone help me, maybe just give few hints , i can
> read,study and spent lot of time.

Best anyone can do (apart from doing it FOR you, but that won't prepare you
for when things go wrong) is to tell you to read documentation on postfix,
exim, fetchmail and qpopper (a pop3 server released by those nice people who
wrote eudora)

DNS via named is beyond me. If you're a small company with just a small
number of static machines though, that might be overkill. You could just
list all your clients in the /etc/hosts file.

Print services can be setup either via samba or CUPS. (Common Unix Printing
System). I *THINK* windows is capable of sending print jobs to CUPS.

If you select SuSE, most of the stuff above is handled by an excellent GUI
setup tool called YaST2 (Yet another Setup Tool).

Mandrake and Redhat have similar things, and, for a config seperate from the
distribution you select and uniform throughout all distros that provide it,
Webmin is reputed to be quite good. (Configure your linux server via a web
browser).

I wouldn't recommend debian for a first time linux user... It's package
management facilities might be second to none, but it has a steep learning
curve compared to SuSE/Mandrake.

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