Looking to move away from Windows? Get started here if you want to reduce software costs while improving the technology choices in your business. A short guide to running a business on “free” software.
Below is a list of open source (free) alternatives to the most common requirements for any enterprise. Most companies will have the following basic requirements. A directory server, a mail server, a database server, a firewall and a proxy server. At some point all companies get past the stage of running everything off a single server, this page should help direct system admins and IT folk to open source alternatives for running a company. If you are still a single server company and simply need an opensource alternative then I would suggest looking at SME Server, this is also great for home users looking to serve a small network.
Right, on to the bigger things. I will break the list of alternatives down into categories to make it slightly easier to follow. Keep in mind that this is not a HowTo, simply a list of alternatives. I would love to do a complete how to but I just don’t have the spare time.
Firewall
Linux is already well known in the business world for its Firewall/Router capabilities. I am sure that most people already have their choice of Nix firewall in mind. However I have always preferred BSD when it comes to Firewalls and recently a FreeBSD based project has caught my attention for its extensive list of features & ease of use. The project is called pfSense. According to their website pfSense is;
“pfSense is a open source firewall derived from the m0n0wall operating system platform with radically different goals such as using OpenBSD’s ported Packet Filter, FreeBSD 6.1 ALTQ (HFSC) for excellent packet queueing and finally an integrated package management system for extending the environment with new features.”
pfSense has an incredibly long list of features however some of the best ones include dual wan routing and ALTQ traffic shaping.
Other popular firewalls include;
Proxy Server
Great, so you have an Internet connection and its now got a router/firewall looking after it. Time to get a proxy server in their to cache those pages. Proxy servers improve speeds and reduce bandwidth usage. In particular with popular pages such as Google.
My choice of Proxy server would be Censornet, Censornet is perfect for the corporate environment. It filters out just about everything that you don’t want floating around your company. Censornet is a combination of Squid and Dansguardian however Censornet pays the fee to use Dansguardian which means you get it for jam. Of course if your want daily blacklist updates then their is small fee however it is very affordable.
Most Linux distributions come with Squid but lack content filtering.
Mail Server
Once again most Linux distros come with a mail server, what you really want in a company is Groupware (Calender,Contacts,Meetings). My project of choice is the Hula Project. The project is funded by Novell however it runs on most mainstream distros.
You could also look at Open-Xchange, if you do not need Groupware then you could just use the default mail server on your distro of choice.
Storage/NAS
Once again I stumbled across a BSD based solution. FreeNAS like pfSense is based on m0n0wall and FreeBSD. The interface is very simple to use and you will have redundant file storage within minutes.
You could ofcourse just run NFS/Samba on your favorite distro if you prefer.
Directory Server
User Authentication is a huge part of any network, you need to be able to control user access to the network and individual systems. My solution of choice is the Fedora Directory Server, although it only runs on Redhat,Fedora or Centos it is definitely a great solution. I would suggest Centos for the task.
Database
Most Linus distros include MySQL, MySQL is a widely used open source database. I currently do not know of any distribution built purely as a database server. I would use Debian since you can run a very lightweight system with MySQL.
Clients
Well the only thing missing is your client machines, You should probably go with a mainstream distro here since it will be easier for staff to get the hang of it. It will also make deployment a lot easier. I would suggest SuSE or Fedora (Centos is great as well).
Congratulations, you have just built a open source enterprise solution. (Well the start of it at least) and the hope that free business software does exist.