Guys

I am starting new job next week with a start up company 6 pc in a office 10 laptops sometimes in and sometimes on the road , going to have a webserver and a ftp server
I talked company into running all linux we are going to run suse 9.1 and mandrake 10 official as desktop I want to use smootwall as firewall router heres my prob they want a network where each user has an account on the network with a mapped home drive so they can log on to any pc or laptop and gain access thru vpn from home , what do you recomend as a network server and will the above items work for me I have already assured them that I will get it to work I have adobe photoshop working great on winex they wannt the networkability of nt4.0/win2k but the security of linux so any ideas would be appreciated

Well I would not combine your file server with your ftp/http server, so those are two separate machines for security reasons. You can map your home drives unto the Samba file server. I don't know about Smoothwall, but I do know that IPCop has VPN built in.

As for server recommendations, you'll certainly want to avoid having to support multiple different OSs, so it would be best to use eith SuSE or Mandrake. Of those two, typically SuSE is used more often as a server, in my experience.

SAMBA, ok


have fun

well I agree keep the servers seperate unless you need the ftp server to store information in a persons mapped directory as well. Even in smoothwall does not have built in VPN, you should be able to alter the config to add it. If I may make some reccomendations. If you are looking for the cheapest way to do this I can mention some free or dirt cheap solutions. First free VPN---PoPToP PPTP server and the the PPTP client. THis is a Microsoft implementation of VPN, it can be brought up to 128bit emcryption, and is easily setup for client machines, it also works well if people want to or need to logon from a windows machine, becuase windows has built-in support to log-on to pptp netowrks as far back as win95. Secondly if you are going to have alikely possibility any windows machines are going to logon use Samba, otherwise I would just use a bash script to mount the directory share from the server for each person as they logon. I realize you all company issued computers are running linux, but someone may want to logon from their home desktop, so this needs to be taken into consideration. If you need to run all the services on one server I would recommend a P4 or AMD opteron system, with at least 1GB RAM and at least 100GB storage. if you seperate them then you could easily get away with a PIII for the http/ftp, and a lower end P4 for the file server. also you might want to consider gigabit ethernet on the server with a switch that has gigabit ports, if you are using standard 10/100 on the clients then like 4 of them won't kill the server bandwidth if they hit at once. What services are you really looking to use and will this will really let people know how to help answer your question better