I compete in the ISU IT Olympics competition and I want to build my school's IT Club a server. Any sugestions?

Question

I would like something cheap, as we are in a small town with little funding, and we have to make our own money as a group. I would like something that my friends and I can build, learn, and operate with efficiency.

As far as hardware goes, we will have people trying to break in, and a large user base. As far as software, I just need something do- able. Thanks much for anyone's help on OSs, hardware, even donations(they can be talked about, at least). (I am looking at file and print, web, and ftp servers right now. I would love to add application and mail. Kudos to help with those, too. I don't know if we will need to create a firewall and web filter or not, yet.

Answer 1

Start by deciding as a club what Linux Distro you want to use. The download the open source version of that distro and start learning

The heavy hitters are Red Hat (Fedora) and Suse (Open Suse), but there are many other choices. All can be customized and worked on to provide the server system you want to use. Linux works great on older hardware, being a more efficient and modular system the the MS offering

Use SAMBA as your file and print server feeding Windows computers

Apache is the web server

MySQL does the database

PHP, or Pearl or Python will be your programming software for web and database work

FTP server ability is built in

Mail, firewall, application development, multiple users, thin clients, clusters, virtual machines all can be added or removed.

The price of all this - your time to download the software from the repositories and read and learn how to apply it. Everything mentioned above is available under the GPL and may be downloaded and used without charge.

Your cost for using the software? The requirement that you share any improvements you make with the rest of the open source community.

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