DanielLawson and PerryLorier have been doing some work with LDAP enabled services for small organisations. Their first project was to write a scalable mail hosting system backed out of LDAP. DanielLawson also did some work on doing Proxy and Samba administration for CrawshawSchool. Thus the idea was borne to create some packages for Linux allowing people to provide services for an organisation.

Goal

To provide reliable, scalable and secure services for an organisation.

Features

Initial Featureset:

• Mail Administration using the mail system as described by DanielLawson
• Samba Administration
• Proxy Administration

• Intranet webhosting

  • A Wiki for documentation?
  • Nagios for service monitoring
• Extranet webhosting
• DHCP
• DNS
• FireWalling/IP Masqurading
• PostgreSQL(?) DataBase
• LDAP for configuration of the various subsystems
• A pluggable extensible architecture

We would like help from the WLUG and greater Linux community to help with this goal.

Technical Details

Note, the following is only based on what we've had experience with. If there are better tools out there for a given purpose, give us a hand by championing them :)

Mail Administration

Using the system described by DanielLawson and used by MetaNet for mail hosting. OpenLDAP for storage of account information. Cyrus for IMAP. Exim for SMTP.

Samba Administration

Currently using Samba 3.0, as it has some features we required. Samba 2.2 and Samba TNG are usable however, although their operation is slightly different. Samba 3.0 is the future, and its more or less stable at the moment, so using it shouldn't be an issue.

Proxy Administration

Using squid for proxy hosting. Automatic Proxy Detection via wpad.pac (see WPAD). Optional DansGuardian and/or SquidGuard for web filtering. See SquidNotes. SRG has been written by MattBrown to overcome some of the problems of sarg. SRG is a flexible log file analysation tool that can generate reports right down to the level of individual files requested.

Intranet webhosting

Nagios for service monitering. a wiki for documentation management.

Extranet webhosting

Allowing for hosting multiple external websites

DHCP

For automatic management and configuration of internal machines.

DNS

Internal DNS for internal hosts, and optional hosting of external DNS.

FireWalling/IP Masquerading

For allowing multiple machines to access the Internet, with optional filtering, firewalling and transparent proxying.

PostgreSQL

For hosting company databases. Perhaps investigate GNUEnterprise for internal company projects

LDAP

For hosting information about users and to act as a configuration backend for the system

Helping out

We'd love people to helpout with this project, creating administration for the various components, packaging and testing, as well as documentation and support.

See also: SecurityServer, ThingsToDoWithYourLinuxBox