[ale] Small Office Server Distro Recommendation

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Thu April 20 2006 19:05, Patrick Bartkus wrote:
> I have a friend who has a small, 2 1/2 person office. They have 3 PCs, a
> laser printer, a color printer, and a laptop.
>
> He presently is running MS-Workgroup networking between the systems. He
> generally has the files on one system but sometimes he puts them on
> another system. Sometimes he looses where he has put his files.
>
> I would like to suggest that he convert one of his outdated systems to a
> SaMBa file archive server and add a big disk or two. But I'm hesitant
> that administering it will be more than he can handle. He has a PhD but
> not in science :-). I would be willing to set it up for him but am not
> wanting to be his IT staff.
>
> Do you have a recommended distro that he can easily administer? I was
> thinking FC5 with WebMin for a SaMBa config util but just not sure.
>
> Patrick "Mr. Volunteer Tech Support"

The thing that I've been using for small offices as of late hasn't been 
Linux at all, actually.  I rather like FreeBSD for use in a work 
environment simply because of the UFS2 filesystem making backups a cinch 
using the 'dump'/'restore' programs without having to take the system down 
or worry about backup integrity, since small offices don't have the time to 
mess with backups and the like, really.

That having been said, if Linux is a must, I'd probably go with a modified 
Ubuntu install, because the SA work can be easily delegated to someone who 
isn't a pro, and if you put PuTTY + Xming on the user's Windows machines, 
they can run X/GNOME/KDE apps without hassle to perform SA type work.

If all you need is WebMin and Samba, then I'd go with FreeBSD, just because 
you can set it up to send backups offsite quite easily using the supplied 
dump program, and it can do filesystem snapshots.  I think that Linux can 
do that, too, but IIRC it requires that you set up LVM and the like; 
FreeBSD only requires that you use the UFS2 filesystem.

	- Mike