Ask HN: Making Server with open source?

2 points by hiteshtr 12 years ago | 4 comments

My organization currently own a server from Fujitsu with cent-OS 6, but Redhat hinder us to install open source software by saying that they will not provide support if we install patches and software's from untested sources. So want to know what is the best list of open source software’s to implement a server with Ubuntu which should have mail server, firewall or watch-guard, ldap and webserver.

akbar501 12 years ago |

Mail: Postfix (my go to SMTP server). However, a lot of people like Exim as well, but I've never got into it. Sendmail is powerful, but unwieldy. Postfix is very simple to configure a basic email server, especially b/c RedHat does such a great job with the defaults. However, be careful with security if you expose your server to the Internet.

Firewall: IPTables if you're running a firewall on the box. However, if you're running a firewall edge of network, then I'd go with a dedicated solution like Shoreline, Smoothwall or ClarkConnect.

LDAP: OpenLDAP. By itself, OpenLDAP is not difficult. However, as you add layers to it like TLS and Kerberos, etc. then the configuration becomes obtuse.

Web server: Nginx (the current king), but Apache is still a strong choice. Nginx works great with the newer frameworks where you're running it as a proxy for your application server plus as a high performance static file server. Apache is still solid if you're developing in PHP.

hiteshtr 12 years ago | |

in web server i have read that using nginx as your front static file server and apache as backend server is best choice ? And also can you tell which is better Linux for server REHL(CentOS) or Ubuntu , as REHL provide out dated softwares but Ubuntu is cutting edge ?

devb0x 12 years ago | | |

centos does necessitate that you sometimes pull an rpm from non standard repo's such as EPEL or rpmforge, due to their focus on 'stability'

phantom_oracle 12 years ago |

Does Redhat offer a list of packages you can install from some type of app store?

You should firstly find out what they mean by "untested sources", as this could mean building code from source/tarballs and not using their 1-click installer for software (where a lot of the software will likely be open source in any case).