[Techtalk] Servers 101

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 08:54:02AM -0500, Billie Walsh wrote:
> Probably use it for file storage/sharing [ be a good place to keep extra 
> stuff for our EeePC's that we don't need to keep on the machine but want 
> to have available ], in house mail [ don't know about that one cause we 
> can actually talk to one another but might make a nice message system ]. 
> I bought a nice USB Sony turntable to record my old LP's and burn onto 
> CD's so it might be a good place to keep music that could be listened to 
> on any PC in the house. At one time I had thought about setting up one 
> to host my own webpages on but out in the boonies where we live we can't 
> get a suitable connection.

Okay, so you want
a) file server
b) mail server
c) music server

I suggest, for the three purposes, that you do NOT try to do them all at
once, but try one first, get it working, and then try the next one.

So, for a file server, you would want network filesystem software. Since
this is a mixed environment, Samba would be the way to go.

For a mail server, the first need is for mail transport software.  I use
Postfix myself, I've found it easy to configure.  Whatever software you
choose, I suggest you avoid Sendmail; it is old and clunky and cryptic
and very hard to configure.

The mail transport is the first stage; when you have that running on the
server, you can send mail on the server (and you could use it for
sending mail outside if you had a suitable connection).  If you did
nothing further, you could still access mail from other machines if you
logged in to the server machine and read your email there (probably
using a text-based mail-reading program such as mutt).  That may be
enough for you, but it probably isn't.

The second stage of the mail server would be to set up an IMAP server on
the server machine.  An IMAP server enables mail software on other
machines to connect to the mail server using the IMAP protocol (if they
"speak" IMAP, of course!), which means that you can use a wider range of
mail-reading software on your remote machines. The mail is still stored
on the server machine, but you can access it remotely.

There are a number of IMAP server programs; courier-IMAP is a well-known
one, but I prefer Dovecot, because it is simpler to set up.

For a music server, it may be enough to simply have a file server, and
have your music-playing programs individually play the music files you
want to play, by accessing the network drives (or however you have that
set up).  There *are* a number of dedicated music-server programs
around, but I've never really investigated them myself.

Kathryn Andersen
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