Simplicity in consulting

Filed in archive Solutions on February 19, 2007

Years ago when I was still young, I received a request for help concerning the implementation of internal e-mail, webpages and backup. The environment was a school, running a windows NT server and windows desktops for the children.
Several options passed my mind, but it dawned to me pretty quickly that I needed a solution that would integrate seamlessly with the current environment. So I went into detail.

By that time, I did not make use of apps I use now to setup a plan and describe it into technical detail before actually setting it up - instead I had in mind what I wanted to do and simply plunged into it. First thing to consider was the choice of operating system for the server I was to setup. That choice was easy : Linux. Why ? Two good reasons : I knew enough of linux and unix to setup a server, and secondly, the installation and configuration of a robust mail server is easy in linux. So I installed postfix on a fresh linux server and configured it to make use of virtual emailaccounts in a virtual domain. done.


Backups weren't made yet so I setup a Samba filesystem where the other NT server could put it's data and the linux server was able to copy it to a tape using the crondaemon. Easy.


Webpages were easy : install and configure apache and set it up to serve out webpages from a folder tree accessible by anyone with the proper permissions to publish et voila : done.

For those of you who wonder what the point of this article is, here it comes. It's simplicity. Don't look further than you need to.