The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 11 (Katya)

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 11 (Katya) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 11 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 11.04 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

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Zentyal As A Gateway: The Perfect Setup

Zentyal is the Linux Small Business Server, it lets you manage all your network services through one single platform. It's a Network Gateway, as well as an Infrastructure, UTM (Unified Threat Manager), Office and Communications Server. All these features are fully integrated and easy to configure, it truly helps to save system administrators time.

In this tutorial you will see how to set up a Zentyal Server to act as a gateway in a very common scenario. Zentyal will provide basic network infrastructure, load balancing between two Internet providers, firewall and HTTP proxy caching and content filtering. All these steps are well explained in the Zentyal Documentation, which is a really recommended reading. The following example network layout is used:

Zentyal runs on top of Ubuntu Server so it will work on the same hardware. You can take a look at the Ubuntu-certified hardware page for more information. There are two ways to install Zentyal:

Using Zentyal installer that you can download from the project website. This is the recommended choice, it includes all package dependencies for offline install and also makes some custom configuration.Install on top of a working Ubuntu Server, you can find detailed info and URL for the repository in the Zentyal Installation Guide.

 If you install Zentyal using the installer you will see this screen when booting from CD-ROM and a couple of wizards will guide you through the process. You can choose default settings in all of them.

Zentyal provides a web administration interface, after the installation a Firefox browser will show up giving you access to it (you can also access Zentyal from any client browser typing: https://zentyal_server_ip). User and password are the same you entered during installation.

Now you can select the desired packages to install, for this tutorial you should install the Gateway package. Later DHCP and DNS modules will also be installed by using the Software Management module.

After this step all the necessary packages are installed, now setup will guide you through configuration wizards for installed modules, in this case Network and Users. We can skip network configuration for now, so if you start this tutorial from an already installed Zentyal you can still follow it.

Zentyal Server is now installed. By following the next steps you will configure each module.

As shown in the scenario, you have to configure three network interfaces, two external routers and one for the internal network. Zentyal will balance traffic between the two Internet connections.

Go to Network -> Interfaces and configure each interface by introducing its IP and netmask. Don't forget to mark external interfaces because Zentyal uses this info in firewall rules. In the next image you can see configuration for one of the external interfaces and the internal one.

Now you have to set up both gateways in the gateways table (Network -> Gateways):

Go to Network -> Balance Traffic to enable load balancing between the gateways.

Zentyal As A Gateway: The Perfect Setup - Page 2

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The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.6 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2]

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.6 server (x86_64) that offers all services needed by ISPs and web hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of CentOS 5.6, but should apply to the 32-bit version with very little modifications as well. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

I will use the following software:

Web Server: Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.1.6 Database Server: MySQL 5.0 Mail Server: PostfixDNS Server: BIND9 (chrooted) FTP Server: ProftpdPOP3/IMAP server: DovecotWebalizer for web site statistics

Please note that this setup does not work for ISPConfig 3! It is valid for ISPConfig 2 only!

I want to say first that this is not the only way of setting up such a system. There are many ways of achieving this goal but this is the way I take. I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

To install such a system you will need the following:

In this tutorial I use the hostname server1.example.com with the IP address 192.168.0.100 and the gateway 192.168.0.1. These settings might differ for you, so you have to replace them where appropriate.

Boot from your first CentOS 5.6 CD (CD 1) or the first CentOS 5.6 DVD. Press at the boot prompt:

 It can take a long time to test the installation media so we skip this test here:

 

The welcome screen of the CentOS installer appears. Click on Next:

 

Choose your language next:

 Select your keyboard layout:

 I'm installing CentOS 5.6 on a fresh system, so I answer Yes to the question Would you like to initialize this drive, erasing ALL DATA?

 Now we must select a partitioning scheme for our installation. For simplicity's sake I select Remove linux partitions on selected drives and create default layout. This will result in a small /boot and a large / partition as well as a swap partition. Of course, you're free to partition your hard drive however you like it. Then I hit Next:

 Answer the following question (Are you sure you want to do this?) with Yes:

 On to the network settings. The default setting here is to configure the network interfaces with DHCP, but we are installing a server, so static IP addresses are not a bad idea... Click on the Edit button at the top right.

In the window that pops up uncheck Dynamic IP configuration (DHCP) and Enable IPv6 support and give your network card a static IP address (in this tutorial I'm using the IP address 192.168.0.100 for demonstration purposes) and a suitable netmask (e.g. 255.255.255.0; if you are not sure about the right values, http://www.subnetmask.info might help you):

Set the hostname manually, e.g. server1.example.com, and enter a gateway (e.g. 192.168.0.1) and up to two DNS servers (e.g. 8.8.8.8 and 145.253.2.75):  

Choose your time zone Give root a password:

 The Perfect Server - CentOS 5.6 x86_64 [ISPConfig 2] - Page 2

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