hi iam working as a system admin in a school, apparently we just purchase 2 brand new HP Proliant Server DL series. my boss wanted to have our own mail server and a web server. but the thing is he wanted both of this to build on an open source platform. as I’ve searched and ggogling around the web. i found this distro to be my choice. before i start there were many things i needed to consider and i hope you could help.
should i install the 32bit or the 64bit system?
can i run both mail and web server on a single machine
if you guys have a documentation of building this things i would gladly appreciate it
I think you may get more response posting your questions on one of the other sub-forums, and with specifics in the title (most posts are from newbies seeking advice). Having said that . . .
Servers are where you can get advantages with 64-bit that you might not with a PC setup. Particularly if there is volume. Or if you are running more two servers and the processor is multi-core, each server will get its own core. The linux 64-bit kernel is mature and, other than a few nuisances, you should have whatever software you need in 64-bit. I would google the machine and linux and 64-bit, just to be sure there isn’t some obscure issue.
Yes, you can run a mail and web server on the same machine, as long as you have enough horsepower to handle the volume. openSUSE YaST has a HTTP Server module that will set up a simple Apache server. You can do a broader and more granular configuration with the Apache tools. YaST also will set up one of two FTP servers if you wish, which can be preferable to HTTP if you are hosting a lot of downloads. YaST has a set up for a Postfix mail server, too. There are other mail servers which you probably want to look into.
The 11.0 documentation is here Novell Doc: OpenSUSE 11.0 - Table of Contents. It covers HTTP and FTP. For the mail servers I think you’ll need to go to the documentation for whichever server you choose.
Good luck. I think you chose the right distro for the job.
olanzky13 wrote:
> the thing is he wanted both of this to build on an open source
> platform
GREAT…but, by that does the boss mean NO COST, or open source…i
ask because if you are the administrator (with apparently no
experience with *nix or Linux) it might be wiser to purchase SLES
(SUSE Linux Enterprise Server)
<http://www.novell.com/products/server/> just to get the paid,
professional help you might need to get going (sure, there IS good
help here, as long as you know who to listen to, and who to NOT follow)…
and, you might also wanna think about some Novell Certified Linux
Administrator Training…
NOTE: i do NOT work for Novell, nor will i receive any compensation
should you decide to go for professional support (rather than what
you get here…)
–
see caveat: http://tinyurl.com/6aagco
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315) via NNTP, Thunderbird 2.0.0.14, KDE
3.5.7, SUSE Linux 10.3, 2.6.22.18-0.2-default #1 SMP i686 athlon
@DenverD makes an excellent point that I should have mentioned. Open Source is a methodology, and for many (or most), an underlying philosophy. But it does not necessarily equate with free. There are commercial products that are open source; they must be purchased. There is open source enterprise software which is “free”, but to be acquired support must be purchased. Some software is freely available, but with no professional support.
I don’t know what your requirements are, but two rack servers would indicate the requirements are not trivial. You will have a user community to service, and they will have expectations (as will management).
This all came to mind especially from your follow-up question re email servers. This is complex. There are a lot of decisions to be made. And there are a number of open source choices, a few free and others not. Novell’s enterprise server, which is open source, is geared towards providing all the administrative capabilities that quality web/emails servers require. So at least take a look at what is included there (as well as the groupware server) for comparison, to see what kinds of additional capabilities you might need. If this is your first experience with these types of servers and with *nix, you have a lot of work ahead of you and very possibly may need some assistance.
thanks for the help, maybe i should ask my boss first regarding this, but I’ll think i should start doing this (mail server) first maybe just for intranet purpose only and see if everything works well.