Inexpensive Network Servers?

Linuxthess asks: "I work in a small company with only 20 or so employees. Being the most tech-savvy of them I find myself doing less work as a salesman, and more as their non-paid tech support. I was asked for a solution to create a domain for login authentication, a DHCP server, a webserver, file & printer services, and e-mail. I found three such companies with an inexpensive, yet solid products aimed at what we need: one is Celestix with their Aries and Taurus products; there is a company in Chicago called Dartek which sell a custom-built box called iMass which comes in three flavors; and lastly a company in Canada named Net Integration Technologies Inc who has a box named Net Integrator that is available in various flavors. Does anyone have experience in regard to these solutions? I think we will go along with the Taurus, but I want to hear a little more regarding the quality of doing this job inexpensively (these things start from $800 and go until $3000). I spoke with a tech-support guy, and he told me customers buy a couple of these since they're so cheap for redundancy, and clustering."

Comments

Mitel SME Server

[jvhaarst]

I'd go for the Mitel SME server, a _very_ easy to install Linux distribution made for these kind of situations.
Installation and maintenance is a no brainer.
I think Mandrake and Suse also makes similar products.

Solaris + PCNetlink

[Gothmolly]

Solaris 8 ships free with their hardware, and the PC NetLink package can be downloaded for free. $999 for a 1U rackable Netra server gets you native NT4-style PDC and BDC support (NOT Samba, licensed from AT&T way back), DHCP, DNS, HTTP, etc.

... in my professional opinion ...

[JWSmythe]

You're missing some essential information, such as how many users is your web server going to serve (the 20 office people, or 100k customers), is DHCP for the 20 workstations, or 1000 dialup users, and is your company Email intensive? Are the 20 people working there doing support Email for Microsoft, or just normal idle chatter?

I'll assume it's a small company, with small company needs, with a little room for growth. If there are different needs, you'd probably need an additional server or two for whatever your loads are.

I'll also have to assume you have a working knowlege of NT/W2K and Unix (Linux specifically). If not, this won't work very well for you. If I was hired at your place today, and told to do it, this is the way it would be done.

First off, build the servers yourself, if you know how. I would build two servers, usage to be outlined below. This would be the order to my hardware vendor. They'll work within these specs, and have the parts to me the same day.

-Fastest and most cost efficent CPU. Probably just over 1Ghz of either AMD or Intel
-*GOOD* CPU Fan (you don't want to worry about it in a year)
-Asus motherboard w/ integrated LAN & video
-Crucial memory 512Mb. is a good start.
-2 Western Digital IDE Hard drives. One smaller one (~16G) for the OS, one larger one (~100G)for any stored data.
-Case. CalPC 1U Rackmount (for rack use), or Enlight midtower if you don't have a rack. ($300 cheaper for the midtower).

Your cost should be betwen $800-$1000 per machine, depending on how bad your hardware vendor rips you off.

You probably also want to buy a CD burner for your workstation. Tapes are cool and big and the bosses like having the tapes safely tucked away in the office vault, but it sucks waiting 8 hours for a restore to roll through, just to find out it didn't store even though everything looked like it did. Have a nice little stack of CD's with all the important stuff on it, and burn new ones occasionally (monthly?). CD's are a *LOT* cheaper than tapes anyways. (less than 50 cents each in bulk).

You could save more money, buying a cheaper motherboard, or cheaper hard drives, but you'll find out it's really not worth it. Which would you prefer, having hardware that never fails, or getting a call every morning at 8am when the staff comes in and can't log in because the PDC is dead.

Now you have two nice stable affordable servers, which will never cause you hardware problems or have mysterious crashes. We build out similiar machines for workstations, since they're cheap.

If you're only doing a little file sharing, that's fine. If you're doing serious file storage, you should consider getting a RAID 5. I personally like the external IDE RAID's. It attaches to a SCSI card in the server, and has 5-6 IDE hard drives in it. There are quite a few companies that build them. IDE is a good choice, they run cool and are cheap if one fails. Because it's RAID 5, you just yank the broken one out, and stick in a new one, without doing anything (ours auto-rebuilds).

On the first machine, set up WinNT/Win2k (forgive me).. Make this your PDC (for login auth), and Print server. That's it. Nothing else. Not a workstation or anything. You *could* let it be a workstation, but the gods of security will laugh at you.

On the second machine, install Linux. I like Slackware (slackware.com). Configure dhcpd, httpd, samba, sendmail, pop3, and possibly imapd. To give you a hint of how easy it is, sendmail pop3 and imapd are already done. dhcpd takes all of about 5 lines in a conf file. httpd is already done, but you'll want to eventually customize. samba isn't all that hard, especially if you've done it before. I copy the same smb.conf around all over the place, just changing the machine's name and share specs.

I've never set up samba to be a PDC or BDC, but it is very possible. It's documented, I've just never done it. You can make the Linux machine BDC, or use a low-end spare (Pentium 166 or so), or volunteer a NT4/W2k workstation.

Honestly, you could have the slackware machine completely done in an hour.

This way is probably a better choice in the long run. Those other companies may be out of business or not supporting your box in a year, and if something needs done, you could be screwed (buy a new box from us). With this solution, you're wide open to being able to fix things yourself. Do windowsupdates on the NT server, install the patches from TechNet. Fix whatever needs fixed on the Linux box (it's easy, honest)..

Here's what it takes to do upgrades on the Linux machine.

cd /usr/src/
wget http://[whateverpackage]
tar xvpzf [package].tar.gz
cd [packagedir]
./configure
make
make install

You won't even have to reboot. :)

I apologize to anyone who thinks this is an unpopular approach, but it's worked very well in several businesses that either I've worked with or simply know someone working at. Little pieces change depending on use. Like, if you're trying to be a hosting company, you'd have multiple independent web servers.

Re:... in my professional opinion ...

[Tower]

Just another note - Get ECC memory. It costs a few bucks more, but if your chipset supports it (and almost all do since the BX) it is well worth it in the long run. A cheap, effective increase to data integrity is always a Good Thing.