Newbie needs advice and help

[dannye]

Hello everyone,

I work with a small Catholic school 3 campuses about 550 students and 100 staff and faculty members.

I just started about a month ago and just about finished with all the localmachine problems. Looks like everything is working.

Now I would like to jump into bigger and better things. I would like to setup a mail, ftp, and web server. However none of this is budgeted and even if it was I cannot get much money.

The first thing I would like to do over the holidays is get everybody an email account with the schools domain. I know they pay for one oratoryschools.org.

The schools are 100% mac so I need something that will work with PPC. I also have a G4 that I would like to use. It was being used as a appletalk fileserver.

I know I want to use linux because it is cost effective and reliable. But I am not sure about how exactly to go about doing it.

The network includes 3 routers i for each campus and from there to switched and everything has static addresses. I believe DNS is provided through the internet provider. I have not been able to find out exactly how this is setup.

Now what can you suggest I do? I guess I am asking for someone to enlighten me.

I have never done this in any OS I pretty much just fixed localmachines.

However I am not afraid to invest my time and learn something new. I just do not want to fail

Thanks in advance,
Danny Edward

[applebear786]

I would like to setup a mail, ftp, and web server. However none of this is budgeted and even if it was I cannot get much money.

I also want to learn how to do this...


The network includes 3 routers i for each campus and from there to switched and everything has static addresses. I believe DNS is provided through the internet provider. I have not been able to find out exactly how this is setup.

I can't help you with very much of what you are curious about, but DNS is Domain Name Service... it is the internet's way of associating names with ip addresses--basically it is a list with two columns, one column containing names and the other containing ip addresses. Your browser checks with its favorite DNS server (which I believe is supplied by the ISP)--if that DNS server does not know the address you need, it automatically forwards the request to another DNS server which hopefully does know the correct address. (so that when you type yahoo you get forwarded to the correct number address without having to know it). To set up an email server I would think it would be unnecessary to do anything with DNS, but you will need to know the settings for the website that you own, and you may need to adjust those settings. You have to check with the company you bought the website from to find that stuff out. For the web server (and probably for the ftp server) you will need to know one of your static ip numbers (the one where you want to host the site) and somehow get listed in the DNS listings. I know this doesn't really provide all your answers, but I just wanted to help as much as I could until someone with more knowledge notices your question.

What OS programs are you running?

[dannye]

well I do not think that DNS will be a problem and I think that all I need to do is get the guys who provide us Internet Access to point to what is going to be our mail server.

I was hoping to use debian as it seems to be compatible with the G4 and I have heard many good things.

[Vergil83]

One quick question, that I think I know the answer to. Is Debian going to be running on the G4? I am assuming yes.

Debian does have a stable version that runs on PPC so there is no problem there.

And since debian is free as in freedom as in price, it shouldn't cost you any money. Debian comes with the several different mail servers, ftp, and web servers. When you install it, you can actually choose to install for a webserver, so it should install everyone you would need. If not, it is very easy to add new programs using the program apt-get. I have gotten mail/web servers running in 1.5-2 hours, but of course that wasn't for an entire school!

Here are some great resources you should check out.

http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/powerpc/
http://www.aboutdebian.com/internet.htm
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/nag/nag.html
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html (the above is from this site)

[farslayer]

This may be just what you are looking for.. Debian does hava a PPC image available.

http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_debian_sarge

This is a detailed description about the steps to be taken to setup a Debian based server (Debian Sarge alias Debian 3.1) that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (web server (SSL-capable), mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/POP3s/IMAP/IMAPs, Quota, Firewall, etc.).

I will use the following software:

* Web Server: Apache 2.0.x
* Mail Server: Postfix (easier to configure than sendmail; has a shorter history of security holes than sendmail)
* DNS Server: BIND9
* FTP Server: proftpd
* POP3/POP3s/IMAP/IMAPs: in this example you can choose between the traditional UNIX mailbox format (we then use ipopd/uw-imapd) or the Maildir format (in this case we will use Courier-POP3/Courier-IMAP).
* Webalizer for web site statistics

In the end you should have a system that works reliably and is ready for the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

Requirements

To install such a system you will need the following:

* A Debian Sarge Netinstall CD (available here: http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian-cd/3...86-netinst.iso)
* an internet connection since I will describe a network installation in this document

you do not need to use the DNS on this machine, but running your own internal DNS server would allow you to access internal web sites by name..

And if you want a more advanced mail setup..
http://www.howtoforge.com/virtual_po..._quota_courier

[dannye]

Thank you so much that really helps alot