[tarballed]

Well, I have been given some new tasks to add to my list. It's cool and I will be busy, but I am lookin go forward to it.

The company I work for, just bought 5 monster servers for our network. They all have 2.8 xeon processors, 2.5gigs ram, 3 hot swapable 320 scsi drives and servRAID. Fun stuff. I have the task of installing everything and getting it up and ready. :)

Ok. As of now, I am documenting everything. Trying to get an idea of what is going on what and so forth.

This is what they want: (I should mention, most will run Red Hat...BUT! I may have convinced them to let me put *BSD on one.)

One of these servers is going to act as our PDC. It will be running Red Hat 8.0 with samba and LDAP.
Server 1 will have the following:
Samba acting as our PDC
LDAP
User directories and files
Some other software that our users will be using.

For server 1, I see the hardest part in getting it up and running with Samba as the PDC and configuring LDAP. LDAP is cool, but it is huge project

Server 2:
Mail server
DNS server
Time Server

Server 3:
Web server
(any other recommendations for this one)

Server 4:
a utility type server
staging server
web server for testing
software testing

Server 5:
Windows :)
Has to run stuff like Anti-virus, some software that will only work under windows.

Well, I have my hands busy. I have a feeling I will visit here frequently for advice and recommendations. I have convinced them to let me use DJBDNS instead of BIND.

As far as email, that is still up for discussion.

Feel free to comment or ask additional questions. I will be eager to hear what everyone has to say...

Looking forward to it!

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[elmore]

Well I guess you'll be busy posting up questions. And that's a good thing.

Samba is easy, LDAP is the monster.

BTW which one is goin to run BSD?

[bsdjunkie]

Heh, being the paranoid freak i am, i would recommend splitting your dns/mail/time server up ;)

[soup4you2]

what about a independant syslog server.. and a gateway/router/firewall server.. you need more box's my friend...

[tarballed]

Yep, this is going to be a nice, long task. At least my manager is not expecting me to knock it out in a week. :)

Samba is easy, LDAP is the monster

Yes, I agree. I think Samba will be pretty easy. LDAP, to be honest, frightens me. :shock: I was working with it sum and it is definietly a project. They did buy some books that hopefull will help.

BTW which one is goin to run BSD?

I'm not sure yet. Do you have any suggestions? I am also trying to get the time so I can build a workstation box running some form of *BSD. But that's another story. :)

Heh, being the paranoid freak i am, i would recommend splitting your dns/mail/time server up

I agree. After doing some thinking today, the mail server needs to be on it's own. No doubt about it. I am going to put the mail server and web server on our DMZ. But I would like to keep our DNS server private. Just allow the DNS server to go out and get updates from the net. But yes, the mail server will be on it's own. :)

what about a independant syslog server.. and a gateway/router/firewall server.. you need more box's my friend

As of now, I currently am running a syslog server. It is receiving my firewall logs as we speak. It is a utility server at the moment, but I would not mind at all in making it more than just that.

I just recently setup the company with a Cisco router and a Watchguard Firewall (decent, does what the suit wants).

So, I feel like I am roaring to go. I have a lot on my plate, but im excited. I will definetly gain a ton of knowledge with this. :)

One thing I have learned a lot over these past few months.
DOCUMENT EVERYTHING! Keeps everyone happy.

Alright. I will been in touch a lot here!!!

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[tarballed]

Alright, thought i'd give a quick update on my tasks so far.

The big one was the Samba PDC running LDAP.
Im happy to announce that i've been able to successfully get Red Hat 7.3 running samba 2.2.8a and OpenLDAP 2.0.27 up and running successfully.

I've been able to add computer and user accounts as well. This was the task I feared most. But, i've almost got the sucker licked. Just need to do some more tweaking and adjusting and I should be good to go...

LDAP is a Monster as elmore put it...I ended up buying 3 books on LDAP and reading through all of them. There is no way I could have done this without them. There is just not that much good documentation on the web...

I have to admin, LDAP is pretty cool once you start to understand. It really has a lot of potential and is extremely robust...

My next project is going to be the web server, which should be a lot easier than LDAP..
So gear up for apache, because here I come!

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[soup4you2]

so why dont you write up some howto's for the rest of us to see what exactly you've done..

[tarballed]

so why dont you write up some howto's for the rest of us to see what exactly you've done

It's in the works. One thing i've done throughout this entire process of setting up LDAP is document everything that I can. There is so much going on that it can get very confusing...

I promise though, once I have it all set and done, I will post a HOW-TO.

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[soup4you2]

good man.... document everything it saves you soo much time and hair if you should ever have to re-do everything..

[tarballed]

document everything it saves you soo much time and hair if you should ever have to re-do everything

Exactly. Being that I am most likely going to setup a second LDAP server, documenting everything is essential...like I said...there is so much crazy stuff going on, I need to review my notes everyday, just to keep everything fresh. :)

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[elmore]

Not to mention, the next time you have to set it up you can go back and look at your own documentation, which will save you a massive amount of time.