[quote=“MaPoSquid”]You can do all of those things with Linux – the fileserver stuff gets taken care of by a package called Samba. It’s not difficult.
OpenBSD openbsd.org/ has a good reputation for being secure by default. However, once you start opening things up – especially as a fileserver – you also open vulnerabilities.
[/quote]
i dont think neither will the linux or bsd people would be very happy to hear you mixing them up 
but yeh, open source is the way to go 
[quote=“cowboy”]I’m a open source code enthuiast, n I guess I have the time to play around with technology, as this is what I do for a living
I don’t really see any cost listed if it’s done using unix…
but if you have a couple of hundred us dollars to spend a year, it beats reading up 600 pages of manual, i wouldnt go any other way though[/quote]
That’s because you’re looking at it from your perspective as a fairly technical user. The monetary cost is actually extremely low compared to the time involved in setting everything up, not to mention the time that you’ve invested to get to the point where you can do it.
Why can MS get away with charging a few hundred for an operating system? Because you don’t need to spend 45 minutes browing forums trying to figure out why you XWindows only starts some of the time (been there, done that)
[quote=“cowboy”]
if the website/mail/file sharing is only for private use, why outsourcing it when you can have a server running in your own place…[/quote]
Because it’ll only cost you $17 a year, which is most likely considerably less costly than the 10-15 hours you’ll spend setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention, you’re much less likely to be on someone’s blacklist compared to hinet DSL.
I use http://www.8-95.com/ for my basic email and web hosting. No problems so far. If you’re going to be putting up a large picture gallery, you’re going to want at least 150-200MB of space(of course, uploading that much is a different story). Some other hosts that a lot of people on Forumosa use are:
[quote=“cowboy”][quote=“MaPoSquid”]You can do all of those things with Linux – the fileserver stuff gets taken care of by a package called Samba. It’s not difficult.
OpenBSD openbsd.org/ has a good reputation for being secure by default. However, once you start opening things up – especially as a fileserver – you also open vulnerabilities.
[/quote]
I don’t think neither will the linux or bsd people would be very happy to hear you mixing them up 
[/quote]
Didn’t mean to confuse anyone. I know the difference between them.
However, OpenBSD can run Linux binaries, or you can recompile most packages to run under it, or you can use the versions that were rewritten for OpenBSD. For the limited stuff that Traveller is talking about doing, as far as I know, OpenBSD has all of the necessary packages.
Oh yeah, me too. Likewise, no problems – although I am going to have to go through my credit-card records at some point to find out if they are billing me every three months instead of every six. I thought I set up my two domains at about the same time (within two weeks of each other), but they just billed me in March as well as June. I’m not getting much email, and I doubt anyone is looking at my websites enough to trigger getting double-billed. But considering that this would mean spending $36/year instead of $18, I’m not horribly worried about it.
No, no. He needs an IBM 3090 with at least six processors. 
A Cray Y-MP would be more suitable if he were a Mac addict.
[quote=“MaPoSquid”]
No, no. He needs an IBM 3090 with at least six processors. A Cray Y-MP would be more suitable if he were a Mac addict.[/quote]
For business, one can run a non-RAID system with Web, Email and File services on it…and one can also run screaming off a cliff. Depends on how liquored up you like to live life. 
Hey Traveller,
I would say if you are going to do it yourself, use Windows. Even though I prefer OS X and Linux, Windows is easier than Linux if you want to learn how to do a lot of this yourself. There are a lot of packaged Linux server products that would would though.
OS X would be good too if you want to go that way.
A main reason I would suggest Windows is Exchange. There is still no good alternative to Exchange if you want shared contacts and calendaring. Exchange 2003 is also extremely fast for remote connectivity if you have laptop users out of the office.
SPAM protection is good to outsource. The name escapes me at the moment but the last one I choose was the best outsourcing company.
You could get any good server than just mirror the drives. That would be good enough for RAID. If you’re going to have a ton of files, then yeah a big array would be nice. Backup is still something to always do.
Want security? Email security is still a joke for everyone. If you want to access email out of the office, it should be through VPN. If done right, it’s relatively seamless and very secure. If you want to get even more secure and really hack proof, you have additions to VPN.
If you want a firewall, I’d go with NetScreen. They were bought out by Juniper and have been selling more than any other security company for a few years, even Cisco.
Outsourcing might be a good option but you would get less than if you did it all yourself.
And Windows can be cheap if you get the Small Business Server Edition. I think it’s limited to 5 or 10 users. Or all the software could be even cheaper if you knew where to look.
Gary
You can download and install ‘Mercury Mail Transport’ from the guys that make pegasus mail. They have a version which will run on a Windows machine. Best of all it is free and you don’t need an IT degree to install and run it… like you need for MS Exchange
I don’t really recommend hosting your own mail, because if your server or ADSL line is down everything will bounce back to the sender. But, if you do want to try before shifting your whole mail system test it for reliability first…
For instance you could try creating a sub-domain off your existing domain so you will not interupt your mail services ie: get your hosting company to create an MX record for mail.domain.com and have this point to your server then you can test with xxx@mail.domain.com once you are happy you could either forward old addresses to the new or setup a mailserver for your root domain.
Ohh almost forget the link: http://www.pmail.com/overviews/ovw_mercury.htm
For those not up to the job of installing a full Linux system, but who are wanting to be able to run their own webserver you can download and install easyphp it will install an apache webserver complete with MySQL & php so you can build dynamic websites (you could even install your own forum 
).
The whole thing will pretty much install itself. As it can install onto Windows you could even install it on your file server, although there are a lot of security risks associated with doing this. :loco:
Ideally install it on an old PC lying around…
If you are doing things on the cheap you should also download the free firewall from ZoneAlarm. Then only allow the webserver process to be accessed from the internet, this should offer robust enough protection for most personal applications, especially as you would likely be running your multiple machines through a router with NAT or ideally a hardware firewall.
EasyPHP : Free Webserver > http://www.easyphp.org
ZoneAlarm: Free firewall > http://www.zonelabs.com