[BUGS] IT Support Business with FreeBSD servers

[Dean Hamstead]

You will inevitably need to support Linux in many forms, especially 
fedora, centos etc. suse maybe. Havent seen much of that in Australia 
really.

If you're serious about business not making a philosophical statement, 
you will also need to support windows. You will find yourself setting up 
  a firewall and some mail, web, app, file servers etc. Then having to 
go around and configure workstations running... windows! This will 
include email, VPN clients, and all sorts of random stuff.

Likely you may also have to do things you never wanted like setting up 
exchange (people love outlook and they *really* love its calendaring). 
You can make things better by keeping exchange from actually being on 
the internet by putting your favorite MTA in front of it. You will 
likely have to configure squid to talk to an Active Directory for users, 
and probably hook Samba in also.

Dont forget to learn some cisco fundamentals. CCNA is not really needed 
but might be helpfull (its not like many businesses are using ATM, Frame 
Relay or ISDN... although i dont doubt there are and they will pay you 
top dollar to get things fixed), but just some idea how to play with 
vlans in IOS and get snmp running, then set up some reasonable ACLS to 
keep things from getting messy.

Dean

Sam Lawrance wrote:
> On 22/05/2008, at 7:33 AM, harrywwc wrote:
> 
>> Hey Brad,
>>> I've done a google search for competitors and found a couple with
>>> quality services, but not many in Newcastle. And many seem to prefer
>>> Microsoft Small Business Server, which I see the advantages, but if I
>>> manage FreeBSD professionally for the business, FreeBSD will be a  
>>> better
>>> choice (in my opinion).
>>>
>>> So, I was wondering if you guys could share your wisdom with
>> Yeah, M$ is out there, lots. Can I suggest you form a casual
>> relationship with a company that does M$-SBS, so you can recommend  
>> them
>> as a 'partner' - perhaps with a small percentage coming back to you  
>> for
>> the referral? :') and of course the 'reverse' from them to you.
>>
>> One thing, think about playing with Linux as well - there will be some
>> who will have Linux (probably RHEL/CentOS or SuSE or even Ubuntu)
>> installed. The difference (once you come to grips with the SysV  
>> startup
>> scripts) is not that great. Sure, some things are in the "wrong"  
>> place,
>> but you get used to that - especially if you've used several
>> 'commercial' *IXen.
> 
> I have to agree here, don't niche yourself into oblivion.  Learn the  
> stuff you don't know, and use what fits!
> 
> And remember to say hi on irc.oz.org #bugs!
> 
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