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1. DAVE MARKOWITZ, REVIEW: LINUX FILE AND PRINTER SERVER FOR LAW FIRMS

TechnoLawyer asks:

>"Suppose a law firm needs to set up a file server.
>Realistically, how difficult would it be to use a Linux
>server and how much would it save over a typical Windows
>file server?"

Using Linux as the operating system for a pure file server in Windows environment makes a lot of sense from both a technical standpoint and cost point of view. (Whether or not using Linux as an application server is another ball of wax which I won't address here.)

The degree of difficulty you'll run into depends on several factors, notably the hardware you plan to use and the Linux distribution (or "flavor") that you pick. Barring any really funky hardware, however, setting up a Linux box to serve files to your client PCs can be a piece of cake.

The easiest way to setup a Linux fileserver is to use the E-Smith Small-Medium Enterprise distribution http://www.e-smith.org. E-Smith is based on the well-known Red Hat Linux, but the installation routine and administrative tools are designed for use by people who aren't Linux gurus.

E-Smith, like other Linux distributions, uses Samba http://www.samba.org to emulate a Windows machine, allowing it to act as not only a file and print server, but also a WINS server and NT domain controller. Aside from the features designed to allow e-Smith to talk to Windows boxes, it's also capable of providing DNS, DHCP, email (POP, IMAP and SMTP), caching proxy, firewall, and VPN services to your clients. A very nice webmail app is also included. You can use or deactivate whichever of these services you need.

E-Smith automatically detects a Level-1 RAID (disk mirror) during setup, and after installation can be administered through a Web browser, console session, or command line over a network connection with a little tweaking.

E-Smith's installer is character-mode but quite polished. It requires answering a few questions about the role of the machine and the network to which it's being attached, after which it formats your disk(s) and loads the OS. Afterwards you'll need to add users and setup the "i-Bays," or Information Bays, which is what the developers call file shares. This configuration is generally done through a Web browser on a client PC, but can also be done in a console session. Once the server is connected to your LAN, your Windows clients will see it in My Network Places/Network Neighborhood as a Windows NT box.

So far I've setup a couple of machines running E-Smith, both of which have been rock-solid. One is the file/print/email/proxy/DNS server on my home office LAN. I periodically pound on this box with multi-gig file transfers and it's never choked. It's been rebooted twice in the six months since I installed it: once due to a power failure, and the second time after having applied some software updates. Other than those two times it just sits there and hums away. It's a Pentium-III running at 550 MHz with a paltry 96MB of RAM. It serves clients running Windows 98, XP Professional, and Linux.

The second box I setup on E-Smith was a HP tc2110 used purely as a fileserver in a small real estate management firm. This box has a 2GHz Pentium 4 CPU but only 128 megs of RAM. It is using a RAID-1 mirror, with a third, removable disk that the mirror synchronizes with once a week using rsync http://samba.anu.edu.au/rsync/. The only time this machine hasn't been running since it was installed in January 2003 has been an after-hours upgrade and reboot. This box serves clients running Windows 98 and XP Home.

Because E-Smith is a Linux distribution it may be freely downloaded and used on as many machines as you like, serving as many clients as you need. You'd need to pay for a Windows 2000 Server license plus a client access license for each workstation, plus each workstation's OS license if you went with a Microsoft-only solution. In contrast, with E-Smith (or any Linux distribution for that matter) you need only pay for the Windows licenses for your workstations' OSes. This can save several thousand dollars up-front, depending upon how many clients you'll have accessing the fileserver.

While recent versions of Windows have made great strides as a server OS in terms of reliability, it still isn't as reliable in my experience as Linux or one of the other Unixish OSes. With modern distributions such as E-Smith, Linux is easy to install and configure to provide file and print services to Windows desktops. Its reliability, performance and low cost make it a very viable alternative for law firms looking at new file and print servers.