And here we go again.....

I recently was asked to solve a problem with my Church's network. It seems that file storage and backup, and internet sharing ar the root of what I need to look at. Of course getting a server was the easy part. We were donated a Dell PowerEdge 4600 Server. I had to get HDD's for it and tried the DELL OEM windows SBS server 2003, it installed fine but I need more then 5 CAL's and we can't afford to purchase any. So I thought Lets go with Linux instead. First its not Microsoft and second it has a better support group.

Now for what I need it to do.

1. 2 seperate networks sharing one internet connection but unable to see each other. (ex. Church Office and School Office and Student internet Connection)

The Church office need to maintain seperate Documents and files from the School office and the students don't need to access any of the aboved. The current setup has three BEFSR41 Linksys routers. One for the Cable modem with the wan ports on the others connecting to its lan port.


|Modem|--wan-|BFS1 WAN|----lan-----|BFS2 WAN Port|--office
|----------|BFS3 WAN Port|--school

Can Linux be configured for a shared internet connect and file storage, with access restricted to file storage from the students. File storage needs to be access restricted from school and office but able to be backed up to Tape.

If any more info is needed please let me know.

You could set up multiple instances of samba on your server:

http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Mult...rver_Instances

Cheers,

Josh

Does your Dell PowerEdge 4600 have dual NIC cards? If so, setting it up to have separate networks that can't see each other is all but trivial. You might need a couple of el-cheapo routers to support the Internet connections, or something like a Linksys reprogrammed with DD-WRT, but definitely doable. Actually your current routers would be more than sufficient. At first pass glance, the key will be to use the built in firewall iptables, to put a block between the two network segments. As long as you keep the root account secure, it would be very difficult to bypass this.

You will also find that the permissions capabilities of Linux far outweigh that in Windows and it will be relatively easy to setup partitioned spaces for the students. Linux will have a master account, called Root, that will be the absolute administrator account and will be able to access anything. Aside from that you can create groups and users and assign, read, write, and execute permissions on a per-user or per-group basis. This will allow you to effectively secure parts of the system for the students and parts for the church. You could then have a tape-backup process/user that belongs to both groups and can back the data up to tape.

I figured Linux was the better answer and as soon as the two bad driver I sent off are replaced I will get started on setting up with Linux. Now for the next part, what flavor of Linux would be best for use. I have a bit of distrust for the PC repair guy my church was using He has shot down rhis whole idea as it would only work with a windows server and only using new equipment. (he only wants the money) and my distrust of him stems from his inability to not only realize that a Cat5E connection was about 80 feet too long but tried to terminate the line with a modular plug and then said we needed to hire a data line company to to make it work, when he could not. I got it to work, but did make a new run to it to reduce the distance. but thats another story.

The Dell server does have actually 3 NIC, a 10/100, a 10/100/1000gb and a FDDI Card as well. I am thinking of using the Fiber connection with the 2950C Cisco Switch. I know it has Vlan capability but I don't know enough to properly configure it yet. The coolest part is that we paid nothing for any of these components, and the Switch was a warranty replacement from Cisco.

I will read the link to the Samba Page and will probably have more questions soon.

Well, even though I may be accused of bias here if you go Centos that's basically a free version of RHEL, which is pretty much the (main) commercial std for Linux (currently). It also has a very long support/updates cycle http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ion/index.html
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_boo...ide/index.html

There really is no right or wrong answer for this. Any of the main distributions would work fine for your needs. If you or one of your team members have experience with one, you might want to consider using it to leverage their experience. The distributions have a lot in common. You have what I would consider to be two main groups based upon package management: those that use the Debian style like Ubuntu and Debian, and those that use the RPM style, like Centos, and Fedora. Aside from that, they differ slightly in visual aspects, such as do they use Gnome, KDE, or other and philosophically like Ubuntu has a 6 month (cometh hell or high water) new release cycle while Debian is a lot slower paced. Then you have the others, like Slackware, which is a probably the most Linux like of all the distributions.

Personally, I use both Ubuntu and Slackware for both servers and desktops and both have served me quite well. Since you are partially School based, you might want to go with a Red Hat variant to get the kids experience with it because of the public name recognition. I would even suggest contacting Red Hat directly and seeing if they have a program for schools and non-profit organizations that would get you a free or very low cost license for their Enterprise edition - again reason being the kids getting experience with their product.

I'm downloading Ubuntu 10.whatever (latest release I will start with that qnd will get back, although I am waiting for 2 of my HD's to be returned and for the Key for a Pull out Drive cage. I figure 34Gb for the os on one of the SCSI controllers and HD and the other 4 drives using the hardware RAID that is on the second SCSI controller.

If I might make a recommendation from experience here. You did mention having a hardware RAID. This may negate the importance of this statement, but wait until you have the drivers to install the production copy of the OS. Go ahead, install and experiment around if you like but don't plan to keep the install. It is easy enough to re-format. When you get the RAID hardware, install the OS and select a RAID format at that time. The reason being is that much easier to create the raid during install than afterwards, partially because the RAID has a different type designation. My impression of it is that the RAID acts like a container, in which you format the drives to a given file system type (e.g. ext3, or ext4).

Have you given some thought as to your RAID configuration? Are you concerned about speed or uptime, or both? If you think you will have a lot of high volume access, consider a striping raid like a RAID 0 or RAID 5 (minimum 4 drives) which you have. If you are more concerned about up time, go with a RAID 1 or RAID 5. You already mentioned tape backup, so you are way ahead of the game.

34GB will be way more than enough for the OS. Spend some time thinking about your partitions on the HD. Linux operates differently than Windows in this regard. From the user's perspective, the file system is flat and starts at the root or / directory. The file system has a structure to it that at first will seem strange. The majority of the OS is kept in /sbin for the core OS files and /bin for the other binary applications. You will also have /usr and /usr/local with copies of hte bin and sbin in them. These are for things that the users have installed. Configuration files are stored in /etc and data that will change like logs and web pages is stored under /var. There is no concept of C or D drives. These folders can be on different partitions or even on different machines across a network and it connects behind the scenes.

The three big partitions to concern yourself with are /, /home, and /swp. I would recommend keeping / and /home on separate drives or partitions. The reason being is that you can update or change the OS and keep the /home folders. There is no concept of a registry like in Windows to break the install. Similarly, there is no hardware Dependant and for the most part you can put the drives in new hardware and it will boot just fine (drivers are loaded at boot time, not install time). You will also want to allocate some swap space, typically 2x your memory, but with large memories today it is necessary to have that much. To give you some rough figures, 10-15 GB should be more than sufficient for the OS root directory (my Ubuntu 10.4 server is running 1.5GB for /). With a large number of users you will want a lot more /home space. You will want about 1 GB or so swap. I keep a swap space on both mirrored raids, but this isn't strictly necessary.

Good Luck to you and if you have any questions with regards to installation, setup, or configuring things to separate the church and school just leave a post here on LQ.

downloaded Ubuntu 10.10 but it hangs after the Bios Checks the SCSI Interfaces to the 1/8 for the Raid Drives. NOt to sure what it is though I do have it installed on a drive on the SCSI chain the Tape Drive is on I tried to test by disabling he RAID board all together in BIos but no help there

When you "it" hangs, are you talking the copy that you installed on the machine or a live CD version?
It is speculation, but off hand it sounds like the kernel is missing a driver to allow it to see your drives. If this is the case, the answer could be to modify the ram image that gets loaded with the kernel. This of course creates a little bit of a chicken and egg type problem.

Can you capture the error message(s) you are getting and what are the specifics of the hardware? More detail would be helpful as it might be the clue that someone needs to help solve the problem.

I would recommend taking a look at this page: Dell-Support-driver Browse around there. That particular link is a driver page from Dell for RAID controllers for Linux that I found by searching for the terms "ubuntu dell poweredge 4600 scsi" Try searching with your make model of PERC and RAID controller cards, etc. The subject seems to get a lot of hits.

The good news is that Dell is Linux friendly when it comes to their hardware. I have been told by a local LUG member that most of their server equipment is Linux rather than Windows based. If this is true, and it makes sense to me, then your chances at a resolution with a version of Linux (even if it isn't Ubuntu) are very high. You might want to contact their tech support department if you run into a brick wall and before you make too many BIOS settings.

For what is worth, I am using Ubuntu on a Dell Poweredge 2950 and it is working perfectly, but I am not using a hardware raid. It is using two ultra-360 scsi drives configured in a software RAID. I mention this because it suggests that you aren't way off base with regards to hardware compatibility on this system and that it is case of your model having something different that needs to be addressed.

I figured the problem out at about 02:00 this morning. The system will not accept a boot from the AIC-7890 SCSI controller but it will accept it from the RAID controller. I need to get with Dell and find out whats up. I checked the bios settings and I even checked the SCSI Bios settings and can't seem to figure it out.