I have a customer that wants me to migrate a website from his current web hosting provider and also setup a mail server to host his e-mail from the same web hosting company. Later down the road he wants to add another website to his current infrastructure. My questions is can I put both domains and e-mail on this one server and how many public IP's will I need? any how to would help thanks

apache can host as many domains as you wish without any additional ip addresses at all, using the virtualhosts functionality. additionally you can host multiple domains on most MTA's without anything special, you simply say that you'll accept more than one domain. there are extra steps to define where mail goes and such, but if it's actually for the same people, you'll probably want that mail to integrate to a common mailbox anyway.

btw, hope you got that ssl stuff sorted out, certainly passed what i'm experienced in really...

As far as the SSL stuff and EAP-PEAP stuff, I put it on the back burner for now. I start taking statistics and Calculus and it is slowly killing me. This client that I am dealing with wants me to put everything on this one box and I was a little hesitant. I am used to separating bigger applications on separate boxes. I know that he doesnt have any databases on the backend so I think that it will be straight forward. His e-mail as well. To put it in a nutshell would this be the correct steps for setting this up:

1 - Get his account info to his web hosting company.

2 - Setup his linux box with Apache (all is a DMZ)

3 - copy his website files from his web hosting company to the local linux box running Apache.

4 - redirect the DNS queries from his web hosting company to point to his local web server.

5 - Setup his linux box with Postfix, Sendmail, or whatever.

6 - Redirect his mx records queries to his local e-mail MTA

7 - harden the box

Two more questions:

How can I implement this in a testing environment before I go live with it?

Secondly, he and his 15 employees who use Microsoft Outlook, Can I use Postfix, Sendmail and etc to work with Microsoft Outlook. I have seen OpenXchange, Scalix, and others and there is a plugin for Outlook to work. Help

P.S

Dude, thanks for everything. In time you will truly begin to appreciate a true metal band like Metallica. Forget those poser grung rock bands. they suck.

Personally i have no experience, and no interest in exchange-u-like servers. i've heard very very good things abotu Zimbra too, and the likes of them may well end up replacing the conventional SMTP / POP3 stuff within some parts of business. but i stick with the standards really...

outlook can certainly use arbitrary pop3 / imap4 / smtp servers, just a case of telling them to via a paperclip or naughty yet loveable puppy. you should generally be able to configure all required services to a level of production before going live, and also presumably migrate one service at a time. as such i'd certainly suggest doing http stuff first, then point the dns records to the new server. remember that email doesn't use standard DNS A records, but MX records, so you can move www.example.com and example.com to point to the web server without any chance of affecting the email side at all, as long as there are still MX records untouched.

one thing i find useful is one of those web developer extensions for firefox, where you can craft the http headers as you see fit. by doing this you can go to http://test.example.com or just http://12.34.56.78 but tell the actual http request to want site1.example.com or www.example.com and get the exact site back but without changing the live site. but essentially, the apache side revolves around the virtualhost directive, and is actually very simple.

i swear i'd rather eat my own teeth than listen to grunge (except nirvana, natch).

One more stupid question:

I can do all of this with his current static ip or should i have get another ip for this web/e-mail server?

regards

all you need to care about is that traffic can hit that box. after that it's all down to the applications handlign the higher layer data. if you have an mx record pointing to a publicaly routable ip on a dsl router, and that's port forwarded to a dmz server on a private class c subnet, then that's fine.

you are the man