Long winded title, but you may find the outcome very useful.
With more time at work to spend on things other than .NET coding, I decided it would be great to setup one of my PCs as a company intranet server. In fact I was directed to do something like this a while ago, but didn’t get the time.
My department does a lot of project work, and thus needs a central location for relevant files. We already have one on our Windows 2003 server, which I is an extremely tempremental beast, but we could benefit from having some sort of content system around these files. That would allow managers and directors to log into our network from anywhere in the world and get the information they want. Browsing through dozens of folders isn’t easy or flashy (flashy is good).
So I set about setting up my old Xubuntu box as a local server (it won’t be facing the outside world). It’s got a AMD3200 CPU and 512MB RAM, which should be quite sufficient.
The first important step is to get a server actually setup. The process I followed, sometimes blindly, was contained in the great Perfect Setup - Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 Server [Howto Forge]. Following the steps you can’t go wrong.
If I could make several points about the installation they would be;
The guide does mention this but I want to reiterate it. After installing the OpenSSH server and configuring the network (Steps 4 and 5), log into the server machine from another PC. I didn’t realise just how useful this would be until I was constantly changing between computers on my KVM switch.
Coupled with the fact that most application windows handle mouse scrolling without taking the focus, you can have the HowTo running in a web browser, while entering in the commands into a terminal window connected to the server via SSH. It’s as simple as
ssh <servername> -l <username>
OR
ssh <username>@<servername>
Setting up the server so that it would be seen on the Windows Active Directoy Domain as server1.companyname.com and not it’s IP address was a little harder. Well actually it was very easy to do, but it took a long time to find out what needed to be done. At this point in time I was not interested in SAMBA or authenticating the server on the domain, all I wanted was for people to be able to access the server by it’s hostname not it’s IP.
The solution was actually very simple. In the Windows 2003 server in it’s Computer Management section is an area for DNS. You need to add a new host to the domain; then simply enter in the computer’s hostname and IP address.
Simple!
Next I’m planning to setup SAMBA so I can share files/folders on the domain and install a content management system on the server.
Hi there,
very nice article. My boss asked me to do nearly the same, he wants to launch very complicated intranet portal. Our office network is running on Windows 2003 server as well.
My problem is I want to set up linux machine with apache, php and mysql running, so I can start with building internal CMS system based on php and mysql.
My problem is that my intranet mysql database will need to be synchronized with public mysql database which is located at the data centre in town together with public client portal and server. Is it possible in some way to do the synchronization in this structure both ways?
Please let me know how do you continue with your project.