Networking solution for a small business

[Tuffie]

I've never really had much experience with networking or servers and such, but a friend of mine has asked me for some suggestions regarding the upgrade of his computer network for his business as they're moving into a new building soon and would like to start fresh, I told him I'd seek advice here.

Currently their nework is pretty dodgey, they've got four people running different computers of just a switch.

He wants to look at having all the following network functionality a server for hosting his website, another server or ? to allow all four people to connect to a network and share and store files and internet between them all.

Can anyone suggest anything?

 

[The_Other_One]

The real question is money. You can do this with cheaper equipment. A pretty solid setup using a Linksys WRT54GL flashed with DD-WRT and another switch would probably work just fine (even if you don't use/need wireless). Does he need suggestions for servers too? Because depending on the load, any ol computer should do just fine. ANd unless he's getting heavy traffic, a single server could hand both file shareing and hosting.

An alternative to a server is a NAS. My Diskstation DS109j has the capability of being a web server with PHP and SQL plus an email server while still serving files to the network. And apparently the latest firmware allows it to configure DD-WRT based routers (still yet to check this out personally )

 

[Tuffie]

Uhm he was talking about a server but I guess a NAS might work, I'm looking at a few now.

They'd also like to have a group of particular computers that they would like to automatically backup to a data server of some sort.

Is there anything that can do all this?

 

[Black6]

I would start with a smoothwall.org firewall/router -free OS that runs on just about any old computer

Followed by a Linux webserver- again a free software/OS

and finally a Linux server running Samba which will function as a domain controller and allows roaming profiles.

If he also needs an email server, Zimbra is great and also free.

As far as server hardware, my email, web, and Samba servers are all Dell Power Edge 2650s that I picked up on Ebay for $250 each. The only time they have been down was during a power outage eight months ago when I discovered that my UPS batteries were bad.