Re: Linux clients in network - experiences?
On Sat, Mar 20, 2004 at 03:41:20AM +0100, Adrian 'Dagurashibanipal' von Bidder wrote:
> Yo!
>
> So far, my experience was with administrating smallish servers and mostly
> stand-alone clients. The future shines bright, however, and I may soon be in
> a position to do much more than that. But, lacking experience, I now need
> some advice.
>
> Environment: typical office environment, no or few 'special' applications.
> 20-50 clients. Friendly $BOSS who hates M$, also, there's not much to migrate
> as this is pretty much start from scratch. (So it's quite an engineer's
> dream). Security is *very* important.
>
> as 'apt-get install foo'.
>
> Office:
> I guess OpenOffice (or perhaps StarOffice) is more or less the default here.
> Perhaps some find that koffice or the gnome counterparts can realistically be
> considered (for people who will receive word/excel/pp documents from their
> customers etc.)?
OpenOffice.org
gnumeric
magicpoint?? - presentations
scribus?? - PDF
>
> 'Collaborative work'
> - evolution is quite mature - but iirc it required a MS Outlook server for
> the calendar application to work for groups. Is this still true?
I think that's not necessarily true. Evolution is a no brainer for
anyone used to Outlook, IMHO.
> - wiki: which one? Focus on usability by people who have no idea what this
> is.
>
Any - but give them the chance to settle on the other stuff first :)
> Business software:
> - financial: sqlledger? How good is it really? How advanced is the thing in
There is a Canadian "thing" but I can't remember what its called.
> - ticketing: phpgroupware has one. request-tracker is quite good. double
> choco latte and bugzilla are available, too. I guess I'll just go with
> request-tracker since I know that a bit. Might be abused as a crm with a bit
> tweaking, I guess.
>
> Server/network set up
> - unix account management: I suspect NIS is not really an option in a
> security conscious environment (just hearsay, though, I'll look at it).
> Kerberos? With pam there should be no problem with integration. Others?
LDAP of some sort, potentially
> - networked filesystem. NFS is certainly not the right tool here.
> AFS/Coda/Intermezzo? Or Lustre? Others? For this and the above, it would be
> nice if laptops could be integrated more or less nicely. Also, if the data
> would be encrypted on the wire this would be an added bonus.
Work out what you need to share. NFS may do: Samba exporting shared
directories may do. Don't predicate everything on one enormous shared
file system - the larger it is, the harder it is to do backups :)
> - authentication: I favor USB tokens (since ssh/pgp secret keys could be
> stored there, too). $BOSS wants fingerprint auth. What solutions do exist (I
> see there's an ITP out for libpam-usb. What about Linux-supported
> fingerprinting systems? Laptops?)
> - firewalls/routers: build my own, or buy? (I see an endless debate coming
> here :-)
Build: iptables should do almost anything you need. If you really need
wireless, then a commercially made small router/switch/access point
might be useful. Stripped down Debian is a good start here anyway.
>
> Hardware:
> - Dual head: what is available with good Linux support? How much tweaking
> does Debian (think sarge) need (KDE? Gnome?)? (Ok, this will change every few
> months, so I'll need to do that research again when this actually comes).
Matrox ?? [Flightgear flight simulator :) ]
> - ok, this would be on the server side: RAID and hotswapping. I personally
> like software raid since I can swap controllers without problems. The
> software RAID HOWTO says it's possible with SCSI hardware, impossible to do
> reliably with IDE. This still true? (SATA?)
SATA supported well as of 2.4.25. Avoid cheap IDE raid cards. Expensive
IDE raid cards are fine. Linux software raid now possible on any disk
AFAIK. Hotswapping may always be more problematic
>
> Misc:
> - What experience do you have with setting the default locale to something
> like de_CH.UTF-8? Personally, I have quite a good impressions, but my primary
> tools are kmail, xterm, vi and konqueror - I rarely use any office
> applications. There will mostly be ???, perhaps a few slavic characters. No
> right-to-left, cyrillic, chinese or korean except in spam mail.
> - what is the color of my briefs?
>
> Ok, enough for a few weeks, I guess :-)
> Thanks already for those who take the time.
>
> Greetings
> -- vbi
>
> --
> Will the information superhighway have any rest stops?
Not an expert - just my first thoughts.
Andy
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