The perfect network server

Serving small networks with free software

Ryan Cartwright
2007-04-18
Server side | Intermediate
0 Up Down
Tags: debian, networks, servers, sme

So you need a server? Not a web server of course, you rent someone else’s for that. No, you need a file server, print server, intranet, mail server and more. Can free software provide the answer? Of course it can.

Well what kind of answer did you expect from Free Software Magazine?

Growing pains

Many office networks grow in an almost organic way. They start life as a single PC, then a second is added and before you know it there are five or ten. Sometimes these are standalone but more often they will be peer-to-peer networked. Eventually this becomes cumbersome and some kind of server solution is desirable. At this point the fledgling IT budget becomes hungrier. Proprietary servers are expensive to buy and licence. Free software has for some time offered a choice of alternatives in this field and this article aims to discuss those options and explain how you might deploy a free software LAN server, which will allow you to start small but which can grow with you with minimal extra outlay. So, if you are looking to deploy a server but are baulking at the expense and hardware needs of Microsoft Exchange, read on. Figure 1 shows a typical network layout for your server, for the purposes of this article I am talking about five to ten client PCs behind a single ADSL line.

If you are looking to deploy a server but are baulking at the expense and hardware needs of Microsoft Exchange, read on

: Figure 1: typical network layout for our target system

Hardware choices

First, I’ll look at the hardware choice. Server hardware for this kind of project will not be particularly special. Bear in mind that it won’t be running a GUI, so you won’t need that 128MB 3D graphics card. Sound is also irrelevant beyond a system beep, so no sub-woofers are required either. CPU, RAM and hard disk will be crucial as will removable storage if you are implementing an on-site backup solution.

Exactly how fast or how big this all needs to be will vary. However, as a guide, I have recently installed two such servers. One serves five people in a small office and is a Pentium II 700/256 MB RAM/40GB IDE HDD. The other serves about 50 people and runs a lot of services. It is a Pentium 4 3GHz/1 GB RAM/2x160GB SCSI RAID array. The first has a USB DVD writer and the second an AIT-2 tape drive. The first was an old desktop PC which was no longer required and the second was custom-built and rack-mounted. Of course, neither have a (permanent) monitor, keyboard or mouse attached. You can also go, if you like, for hosting dedicated servers, which will give you more choice and bandwidth. But it’s totally up to you.

It’s unlikely you’ll have any hardware issues specific to running free software. Especially considering the advances made by GNU/Linux distributions and the BSD options. If anything, I would be careful of older network cards and devices mounted on motherboards as some of these can use peculiar chipsets. If you do have an issue then you can buy fairly cheap GNU/Linux compatible alternatives on-line.

Designed to serve

What might such a server be expected to—er—serve? Here is a suggestion: files (Samba); printers (CUPS); Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP); mail (Exim/Procmail/Qmail/Sendmail) and intranet (Apache) internal websites.

The names in parentheses indicate typical free software packages you could use to provide such services. The resources section at the end of this article has links to most of their websites. The mail and intranet services could be provided elsewhere but there may well be situations where a standard ADSL account is used for connectivity and this includes a single catch-all email account. A server like this would give staff individual mail addresses. Similarly, a website may be available, but in a single office environment a local server would provide a more manageable and controllable intranet.

Free software options

Whilst there will be many ways to skin this particular cat, I shall look into two of the most popular ways of deploying a free software LAN server.

Build it yourself from a typical distribution
Download and install a customised made-for-purpose distribution

So how do you decide? My advice is to work out how much time, budget and skills you have available and go from there. If you have no time at all I would stop now. Installing a server will require some time (even—or especially—a proprietary one). If you have a couple of weeks, know how to use a command line and fancy a challenge then go for the first option. If you have a week and don’t know what a command line is then go with the second option.

Work out how much time you have available. If you have no time—stop now

I’ll be looking at one example of each. Of course, your preferences may differ from mine but that’s the beauty of free software—choice. Another one is scalability. Both these options will, given adequate hardware, scale to support much larger setups.

DIY servers

Building your own server from a standard distribution will involve more work, particularly in maintaining packages, installing updates, etc., but it will be your server. It will run the software you choose and will be as unique as you want it to be. You are unlikely to get a support contract for it but at this level you are unlikely to need one. This is the “fun” option. That’s in the same way that building your own house can be fun. I’m looking at a Debian GNU/Linux-based server.

Base install

You can download an install CD from the Debian website. I usually go for the NetInst CD. The Debian installer (at time of writing) has a familiar curses-based interface with fairly self-explanatory options (see figure 2). Follow the instructions and then reboot when requested.

: Figure 2: the Debian installer showing package collections

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Copyright information

This article is made available under the "Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike" Creative Commons License 3.0 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.

Biography

Ryan Cartwright: Ryan Cartwright heads up Equitas IT Solutions who offer fair, quality and free software based solutions to the voluntary and community (non-profit) and SME sectors in the UK. He is a long-term free software user, developer and advocate. You can find him on Twitter and Identi.ca.

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Namaste!

i like the article;
but it flew over the entire scenario without going into the details like an expert would do!
i am not talking about dictating options like select-this and select-that but a general detailed overview of the various services/daemons, typical-scenarious is way better than a sweeping view of everything!
Keep up the good work

I'd have loved to include more detail on the daemon's etc. but it simply of a case of not enough room. The main purpose was to give a hint as to what is possible with free software. Also I wanted very much to compare the two ways of approaching it rather than explain how to specifically do either. Again this was mostly a space restriction.

FWIW I am currently updating my HOWTO for tldp which was written in 2000 and last update about four years ago. I'll be doing it based on the stuff I've written about here, with more detail on the Debian rather than the SME Server side of things.

But okay - let's throw this out then. A recent poll here suggested people wanted more HOWTO type articles. So how many people are interested in the idea of a more detailed "How to setup a LAN server using Debian" article? Assuming I use the setup described here as a basis what else would you want included?

Post your comments here.

Ryan

Well if you would like ideas I would love to see an article about setting up single sign and a domain for your home using a debian based distro.

hey this is one of well written article I read after many days. keep it up

-Stella Roy
http://rahul-stella.blogspot.com

As soon as I think of building this server, I think of other articles I've read online. Most of the articles mention the use of Suse or Ubuntu. My experience (very little) has been with Ubuntu, for the Server method. I like the looks of this Debian software selection, to specifically choose Web and/or Print and/or File Server, etc. Seems like any easy way to get things up and running. Setting up mail seems a little difficult, and perhaps the majority of people wouldn't need this option (maybe just me ?). For the backups, I'm currently using rsnapshot, it seems to work well. But nice intro article. Thanks.

I've used SuSE in the past but find the package update process in Debian much better. A particular tip is to install apt-listbugs ( apt-get install apt-listbugs) which retrieves and display brief details of bugs listed for the packages you want to install. Really useful if you are running testing (or unstable if not on a server).

I looked at Ubuntu for this but found it added little to the Debian way I was used to.

Setting up mail can be tricky regardless of how you do it and there is an argument which says that is for good reason. It is made easier by the install guide shown which really comes down to understanding the options shown. This is turn requires a little more understanding of MTAs in general - never a bad thing if you are deploying one. Of course if your server is not serving mail to anyone then you can probably install smail ( apt-get install smail ) which makes it trivial to just forward non-local mail to your SMTP relay of choice.

cheers
Ryan

Nice article!
I would be very interested in a more detailed how to setup article, if possible.

I am new to Linux and wish to learn as much as possible.

thanks,
George

FreeBSD is way better for a server like this :)

because?

Appreciate the presence of the smiley but you can't make a statement like that and leave it at that. I've never used FreeBSD - generate some discussion - convince me.

FreeBSD is about a 15 minute install. It uses sysinstall which is one of the easiest to work with. Once setup, the following commands as root and the server you have listed here is online.

pkg_add -r samba
echo smbd_enabled="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf
echo nmbd_enabled="YES" >> /etc/rc.conf
nmdb -D
smdb -D

from there, you can connect to a GUI for samba that is very intuitive, you can create users and shares easily at the address 127.0.0.1:901 Also the samba pkg_add will automatically install all dependencies like CUPS or what not.

sendmail is installed by default, so no worry about that. frankly it comes down to this. FreeBSD packages and ports are updated within two days or less on the updates of the most popular applications. apt-get is nice, but I remember having to compile PHP by source because they weren't exactly planning on adding the updated package for it anytime soon. and unlike debian, ALL the packages are stored on the FreeBSD server, I never have to add repositories like I had to on Debian to install some applications. every application I've ever needed has been ported over from linux to FreeBSD, and it also has linux 2.6 binary compatibility in the -CURRENT release.

U want an all purpose server? Cheap as, reliable and multi-puropse for mid ranged company?

Go with a Sun Fire X2200 M2. Cheap, and with Gentoo (or whatever), you can do whatever you want with it, add raid 0 (unfortunately soft). It's a perfect DNS srv, DHCP, Postfix, web (clusterized or not), mysql standalone or whatever else, for like 2.5K US for dual core dual cpu.

I love that thing :)

JNH

I was surprised to see you had suggested installing Debian. Kudos to you for picking the "best" distro!

I'm chuckling because I was asked to exactly excute the scenario you outlined above two week ago for a small business client.

I set up ubuntu 6.04 LTS server on a surplus AMD 1200 MHZ with 750 MB RAM. Topped it off with a coating of Xbuntu so those that were "Terminally" challenged could still access it!

Grabbed a Dynamic-assigned domain from DYNDns and set up Apache.

Set up Samba to allow the rest of the XP challenged office to access file shares.

Worked perfectly the fisrt time. Took about 5 hours but as it was the first time I had set up a server was very pleased with the result, as was the client.

I use Fileserver for 5 clients. Disks are mounted to clients by nfs. Configuration is PentiumIII 1000MHz, 512MB RAM, two IDE/ATA hard disks, not RAID but working in some way parallel. I want to briefly share my experience. The processor is fast enough. Network have to be 1Gbit/s. Because of /home is shared by nfs it should be SCSI with very low access time. And as much RAM as possible (for disk cache). Of course too much RAM costs too much. However 2 - 16 GB I think is reasonable choice. Also you need to thing about how you place data on disks.

I'm currently using VMWare server to host SME and a web server using unbuntu as the host and guest (for the web server).

For a small site I find this very useful. Backups are easy, just zip the files for the virtual server. If the main machines goes down, then getting the virtual server up and running on another machine is easy, takes 5 minutes.

Running the server on a dual pentium 4 2.8Ghz, with 1 gig of ram.

"Contrary to what certain software companies believe, running a GUI is a waste of resources for a server"

BS!

This presumes:
- the admin is 100% completely able to solve any problem, any time. Without the need to reference _any_ outside resources. Now and in the future. Forever.
- no outside connectivity is needed.

I'm not saying:
- it has to run all the time.
- it has to be significant. xfce?
- it has to be fast.

But it has to be there:
- when trouble happens you have to be able to use web resources and read documents, e.g. .pdf, to solve the problem. Especially if the machine has a problem particular to its configuration that you can't easily duplicate on a spare test machine.
- lynx just won't do it all the time.

Better to have it in and solid up front at install time, than in an emergency where (a) you may not have network connectivity to be able to install it, (b) you can never tell if installation is going to impact or change the situation of the current emergency problem.

You cannot presume up front that a GUI will never be needed, ever. To do so is just foolhardy. Better to have it there, up front, just in case, so you know when problems arise that it is not part of the problem.

Yes, Windows needs it, because not everything is configurable from the command line. But it's getting better. [Better, even now, to have a second partition with a minimal windows install, so you can boot into it and affect the production install, when you have to do so but can't due to files open, registry, or whatever, from the production OS partition.]

When you're in an emergency / down situation, that is not the time to have to think about how to get in place the resources you need to investigate and examine the problem, before you can actually get to the problem.

Particularly if, as the target audience of this article is, you're a new Linux admin.

Could you please tell me which tool you used for the network diagram on the first page (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/files/www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/nodes/1774/ss/figure1.jpg)?

I liked the network icons and would be glad if you could share them.

Thanks!

I used OpenOffice Draw to create the diagram. The images came from the OpenClipart library. http://www.openclipart.org but the site was down for maintenance when I wrote this. I got it by installing the Debian package (openclipart_openoffice.org)

cheers
Ryan

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