Hi. Perhaps this thread should be in newbie. Anyway, I work at a small construction company where the office has three Windows XP computers on a wireless LAN. One of these PCs is available to anyone who might need to go online or whatever. This morning my boss asked me if he could have more than one company email address, like Chuck@MyCompany.biz, Jay@MyCompany.biz, etc instead of just our current address: MyCompany@comcast.net. I think we have registered the domain name (MyCompany.biz) so now I think I just need to configure a server to manage our email. I want to install OpenSuse on a partition of the extra PC and set up an email server on it. Possible?
Thanks for any input.

I would not mess around with an in-house mail server for a company this small.

See www.google.com/apps

It is free for up to 100 e-mail accounts and you can set it up to use your own domain (myname@construction.com)

You can access your email via Outlook, Thunderbird or other client or you can use web access.

The current free email account has 7+ Gigabytes of storage, you have 100% uptime and no administration or management to worry about.

PostFix + Dovecot = high performance SMTP IMAP/POP3 service.

Check out my tutorial here, PostFix and Dovecot. Also be sure to read this article, How to prepare your server to host email , which describes what you need to do to ensure that your mail server is configured properly from the get go.

For filesharing this largely depends on the type of computers which will be connecting to the file server.

Since you are going to setup a file server for Windows workstations you should look into SAMBA, which is compatible with Unix, Windows and Macs.

If you've got only Linux workstations NFS is often times recommended over SAMBA, but most people won't notice the differences between the two. I certainly haven't noticed a difference performance wise.

Reference: http://samba.org/samba/

Also I haven't worked a lot on SUSE. I would recommend CentOS 5.2 since it's based on Red Hat, it's easy to install and configure, and you can find lots of documentation at http://kbase.redhat.com/faq.

Let me know if you need more specific information.

I work for http://hostmysite.com and we setup these types of servers for small businesses all the time. If you're willing to learn a bit you should have no problems setting this up in house. In addition if your ISP hasn't already allocated an IP address for your network you will need to contact them to determine the pricing for at least 1 dedicated IP address, this is also a good time to have them configure the RDNS for your IP to match the hostname of your new mail server.

One thing to note is the fact that your email will need to be available 24/7, if you have a computer which is already running Windows XP, you will have to sacrifice it to run the Linux server.

If your boss is serious about his setup show him the HostMySite.com website, and tell him to request a quote for a dedicated server with CentOS. Alternatively you could setup a shared account just for email purposes, but you must remember that you will not have the resources a dedicated server would allow you.

http://www.hostmysite.com/hosting
http://www.hostmysite.com/dedicatedservershosting/

Good luck!

1 members found this post helpful.

Just wanted to add to the support of not doing it in house.

You'll need the machine to be on 24/7 (you'll need an UPS), you'll need a dedicated IP, you'll need a DNS MX record setup. Also security is a big thing. You don't want to become a spam bot.

As nathacof said, even tho kinda of a commercial, it may be a good idea to hire someone to manage it or some sort of 3rd party...

Now a file server for the office, would be a much easier task. Plenty of HowTos on file servers and samba, google is your friend.

Sorry if my post sounded like a plug. But I do these types of things on a daily basis and I honestly believe that HostMySite is on it's way to becoming the best dedicated hosting solution in the industry.

There are a number of other hosts that can offer you the same service, however HostMySite separates itself from the rest of the pack by providing a superior level of customer support. In this case, it sounds ideal for the poster's situation.

In order to prove our worth, we typically tell potential clients to call our Dedicated Server Line, 1-877-472-6784, 24/7. You'll normally be speaking with a live person within three rings.

I did also provide steps necessary to set this up on his own, which is not as hard as everyone here seems to believe. At all my jobs, when the boss told me to do something, I did it... regardless of what people on public forums suggested.

Just my two cents.

Agreed. Maybe not Google, but definitely outsource this kind of thing to an outfit that has a lot of experience doing it, that way you can concentrate on doing the things you have a lot of experience with.