Linux server with Windows clients

flat-6

flat-6

flat-6

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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Lancaster
My current employer is looking to buy a server for the project I am working on, storing test data etc. They also have a small office with about 6 PCs, with just a basic network, no kind of server currently implemented.

All the client PCs run XP Home (I know) and when I told him he'd need XP Pro licenses for all of them if he wanted to run a domain he baulked at the idea of spending the money. Having to administer an exchange setup isn't my idea of a good time anyway.

So what I was thinking was setting up a linux server to act as a file server and to do email. How much trouble is this? I was thinking Samba shares would be fine plus running an imap server for the office shouldn't be too difficult. Any thoughts on this, and on which distro to use?
 
Linux is definatley a good alternative. You can get Exim and Dovecot setup relativley easily..

I would reccomend CentOS 4.x as the distro
 
I setup exim and courier-imap about 2-3 years ago at a company when the Mdaemon-based windows mail server blew up and I needed a quick free solution. Took a few hours of the day to setup and has been working great ever since, now serving 40-50 users with over 40gb of email over nearly half a million messages. Webmail is a cinch with squirrelmail or something similar. Got a few TB of data which clients access over samba, no probs there, too. Certainly beats the Windows 2003 server which has to be rebooted every week ;)
 
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