Small business server?

[gabrielcrowe]

visiting one of my clients, i have seen a quote of about 3k for a small business server.

windows etc, with all the gubbins to run 5 computers.

though in the grand scheme of things, this is not a lot of cash, the company (and myself tbh) think this is daftness, when there is already a usb backup/online backup happening and things are working semi-fine at the moment, on a peer-t0-peer (windows share) type solutiojn.

what the company really needs, is:
- emails with a server, not just clients on a laptop
- data safety, unified backups
- data security (aka encryption)
- hardware redundancy (aka, we dont care if a laptop breaks)

i'm a mac and linux person, and i know this can be done with ubuntu. but the only person that could take care of it, would be me. linux isnt very user friendly, for the people who work there.

anyone got any ideas on how to get this for an economy price?

[Mark H]

We looked at setting up something similar for someone who didn't want to go the server route. It's a bit of a lash up but it would work:

• Wireless and/or cabled network to Laptops, no data held on laptops.
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) drive box with RAID.
• Small PC (eg Acer Aspire One) acts as a "hub" for NAS, primarily to implement Truecrypt encryption for the NAS - the other laptops would actually see the unencrypted data through this PC once the NAS had been mounted each day onto this PC.
• Emails externally Exchange hosted - one account each - can access via Outlook Web Access, and accounts can "talk" to each other.
• Laptops can access the "hub" PC when on the road using TeamViewer or similar

Excluding the user laptops, NAS plus small PC should be about £750 depending on amount of data.

[RuralWeb]

MS do exchange in the cloud now

[Chunkford]

MS do exchange in the cloud now

There's that cloud again

[fergusw]

There's that cloud again

It never rains but it pours.

[fergusw]

The NAS route does provide interesting options.
We've been trialling the QNAP NAS 409 for a while. Not a bad piece of kit. Inbuilt apache style server et all. I know there was a thread on here about NAS boxes......
Email in cloud covers the other aspect. It's really down to sys admin overhead....

MS box as domain controller with Windows XP/Vista laptops allows for the sys admin just to set up box, network, users and policies and let the users go for it.
With a domain controller deployed AV and firewall package in place you can tighten up the holes that users sometimes can expose through naievity or inexperience.
Horses for courses......

[gabrielcrowe]

actually, i just checked, and it really looks good.

http://www.microsoft.com/Online/default.mspx

5 seats for a monthly fee, looks like neatly sidestepping the hardware cost, as a very reasonable price.

[chris ashdown]

Only just off Gabs question

At present we have computers linked by ethernet link and switch

We do not use any shared software except actinic Master + four clients

What benifits or disadvantages if any would we get with a server

[gabrielcrowe]

automatic backups, plenty of redundancy.

what we had to ask ourselves was:
- what if x laptop was lost/smashed
- what if the data was stolen/compromised
- how can some of the accounts/creative/admin people work from home?
- what happens when your tech guy is off sick?

etc.

[leehack]

Don't forget a fire.

[gabrielcrowe]

how could i forget

FIRE

it burns my pingers.

[chris ashdown]

Sorry I dont understand, we have automatic backups of most important items like sage and actinic onto a seperate network raid drive

How does Fire risk differ from server to computer network.

I mean apart from spending plenty of dosh for a server and software, how would it benifit me, would it be faster etc

Is server side software better than stand alone?

[fergusw]

Peer-to-peer networks are fine as long as you keep a handle on the shared resources. If you have 20 folders, 2 printers and a bunch of devices hanging of each computer in a peer to peer network then your network traffic is going to be full of all computers broadcasting and talking to all the other computers and devices.

If you have a good switch/router and hang a NAS storage box and network printer with their own IP's then you can have a pretty robust network without much in the way of speed problems.

Windows server / client PC models are useful for security, scalability, exchange (unless you use could) and other useful attributes that you get for managing networked machines. As long as it is correctly administered that is.

As I mentioned above, you can also use a DC (domain controller) to manage client machines for AV, firewall, network shares etc
You can also use it for internal/external access as web server itself, or web based email access if using exchange.

I don't have much knowledge of Ubunto in a server/client scenario so can't comment on that..... be interested to know more though.
Depends what your business needs are really.....