[Gllug] Help Needed for windows to linux migration

[Richard Jones]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 04:46:39PM +0100, kumara g wrote:
> 1)what type of firewall is recommended ?

Red Hat comes with a simple packet-filtering firewall, which is
probably your best choice if you've already installed RH.

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/custom-guide/ch-basic-firewall.html

> 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)

That's probably the simplest way to set it up. If you are paranoid
about security then you should install a separate box (probably
running a different operating system, such as OpenBSD) between any
servers and the outside world. However you'll probably find that the
combination of NAT and a packet-filtering firewall will protect you
enough. Remember to be religious about applying updates to this
machine, and to all the other machines on your network for that
matter; and remember to disable any unnecessary system services; see:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/custom-guide/s1-services-serviceconf.html

> 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?

Run them all on the same machine. In the highly unlikely circumstance
that you find that one machine is not sufficient - eg. that machine
has a very high load - then separate off the service which is causing
the load to another machine. The 'top' command is useful to diagnose
which processes are using most CPU and memory resources.

Mail server: see below.

DNS is always 'fun' to set up - I usually start by copying an existing
DNS configuration that I've set up before. If you mail me privately
I'll send you the DNS files for my home network which should be a good
starting point.

Proxy server: install Squid (it probably comes with Red Hat?)

Samba: don't ask me, I've never got Samba working "right", but other
people on the list seem to have no problems with it.

You'll probably want to share files from the central fileserver with
NFS (your clients are Linux?). This is easy: just edit /etc/exports on
the server and make sure the NFS service is actually running. On the
client, mount exported filesystems by including them in /etc/fstab.

You might also consider centralising authentication. There are two
approaches to this which I've used: using "NIS" (bitch to configure,
very unreliable), or use LDAP and configure each client with the pam
and NSS ldap clients. Last time I looked LDAP was the better of the
two, but both are/used to be very hard to configure.

> 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

Red Hat comes with Sendmail and POP and IMAP services. They should
just work out of the box, once they're enabled. If you find Sendmail
configuration to be a problem, then go and get Exim
[http://www.exim.org/] instead.

> 5)Any resources / sugesstions for above set ups ?

Don't forget the manual :-)

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - all your business data are belong to you.
"I wish more software used text based configuration files!"
 -- A Windows NT user, quoted on Slashdot.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug