Re: Linux Help

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 10:50:07PM +0600, Kev wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm new to Linux, so i'm paling to install a gateway, with the following,
> 
> 1. Firewall

On Linux, your choices are pretty limited: ipchains or iptables. On a new
installation, I can see of no reason not to go with iptables.

> 2. DNS

Without more information, I'd say BIND 9 (http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/).
It's stable, secure, and full of nice features.

> 3. DHCP

Again, without more information, the obvious choice is ISC-DHCP 3
(http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/).

> 4. SMTP (relay only)

Here you've got lots of options. I personally maintain Sendmail
(http://www.sendmail.org) on a variety of platforms (OS/2, Red Hat Linux,
Debian GNU/Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and NetBSD) and find it to be full of
features, but a real PITA when it comes to debugging. Since all you want to
do is relay, and for reasons I'll explain in the next point, I'm going to
recommend Exim (http://www.exim.org).

> 5. Email Virus Scaning

If all you are doing is virus scanning, I'd suggest using ClamAV
(http://www.clamav.net). To avoid needing to use a milter (I can't recall
whether Exim supports milters), I'd highly recommend MailScanner
(http://wwww.mailscanner.info). It uses a two-queue solution that obviates
the need for milters, and in my experience increases mail throughput by as
much as 10x compared to milters. It can be easily setup to call a spam
filter such as SpamAssassin (http://www.spamassassin.org) and a virus
scanner such as ClamAV (http://www.clamav.net).

> 6. Gray Listing (email)

SpamAssassin or MailScanner can do this.

> 7. NAT

This is done with iptables.

> 8 Web Cashing

Squid (http://www.squid-cache.org) is the best one I've used. I use it on a
NetBSD box in front of a cable connection to do transparent proxying, and
it works marvelously.

> 9. Web Based Configuration tool for all above.

Definitely Webmin (http://www.webmin.com).
 
> can any one tell me the best Linux version to use, (RedHat, Debian, etc)
> and the software i can use, like DNS = BIND, some thing simple to use...
 

While I've been a devout Red Hat user for years, I've been shying away from
Red Hat on new installs because they've been moving away from personal
users and concentrating almost exclusively on the commercial customers.
Fedora isn't (and wasn't intended to be) as well-polished as Red Hat 9, so
I'd go with Debian. It has a large user and developer base, so it's not
going south any time soon.

> the Box will be a P2 with 256MB ram but if i can get it to work on a P1
> 166Mhz that would be great....

Especially for mail filtering, you're going to want as much CPU power and
RAM as you can throw at it. Go SMP if you can. You might even want to run
that P1 for DHCP, DNS routing if you can, so that those services don't get
slowed down significantly if you suddenly get a huge spike in mail traffic.
Web caching benefits from having as much RAM and hard drive space as
possible, but CPU power isn't as much of a concern for it.

-- 
-- Skylar Thompson ([email protected])
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/

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