Linux for small business

[Kevin Brown]

> I only have experience on linux for desktop use 5% of
> my time. My friend would like to know if they can use
> Linux for the small business. This is what they have.
> 
> 1. 20 PCs with either Win95 and Win98 installed.
> 2. A 7MB DSL line goes into the office.
> 3. One DSL/Router/Hug to shared the internet to every
> PCs.
> 4. One dual PIII 600 512MB memory server with Win2000
> and a shareware email server.
> 
> This is what they need.
> 1. A firewall to secured the intranet

IPchains in the 2.2.x kernels
IPTables in the 2.4.x kernels

> 2. A mail server that can sent and receive company's
> email

sendmail
qmail

> 3. A File server, so they can share the files
> (samba?).

samba sounds like what they want.

> 4. Every employee will need to logon to the network to
> access internet/intranet. Is it something like domain
> controller, Active Directory and LDAP in NT
> environment?

I think this can now be done with Samba, of couse since they are using Win9x
there isn't any real security (unless they used the policy manager to edit
default permissions when no login provided).

> 5. Of course Apache Web Server and MySQL and PHP for
> internal web site. (I cna do this)
> 6. Virus protection.

I believe there are email scanners for Linux servers.

> My friend try to cut the cost by not using MS
> solutions (MS SQL, MS Exchange, MS ISA, IIS, etc).
> What Linux Package should he buy to get all those
> capabilities? They are not going to get rid of win 95
> and 98, because some account software are installed.
> 
> Is it difficult to setup that up? What will be the
> average price for all this? I think I will be the
> person to do this. It is a challenge to me though. :-)
> Can you do all this on that Dual PIII server?

Yes all this could be done on the server, the more things it's running the
harder it is to secure.

> I use Mandrake as my second desktop, but i have never
> setup firewall, router and mail server on Linux. Can
> anyone provide some resource that I can check out?

freshmeat.net
Virus Scanners: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=virus+scanner&section=projects
Email: www.qmail.org, www.sendmail.com

www.linuxdocs.org (should be samba and firewall howto's on this site).

Distros that can do the above:
www.mandrake.com
www.redhat.com
www.debian.org
www.gentoo.org
and many more...