Topic: feedback invited

[sam varghese]

i'm getting down to reviewing e-smith for a computer mag in
sydney, australia, and would value some feedback from seasoned
users. comments about uptime, problems with cable/adsl,
and how it handles bigger networks (anybody running a
network in the 100s with e-smith)- would be greatly appreciated.

sam varghese

[Darrell May]

sam varghese wrote:
>
> i'm getting down to reviewing e-smith for a computer mag in
> sydney, australia, and would value some feedback from seasoned
> users. comments about uptime, problems with cable/adsl,
> and how it handles bigger networks (anybody running a
> network in the 100s with e-smith)- would be greatly
> appreciated.
>
> sam varghese

Will you take a comment from an e-smith partner and reseller?  I've been involved with e-smith since November.  I only have a small number of clients using the product so far but I can state that it is remarkably reliable.  I have one school of approximately 600 users using it for webmail.  Can it handle large networks?  You bet.  As long as the hardware is capable, e-smith certainly is.

I think the best thing I can say about e-smith and open-source in general is if you want to do something, the answer is always YES it can be done, and chances are there is an open-source solution awaiting.

Regards,

Darrell May
DMC Netsourced.com

[Rob Hillis]

sam varghese wrote:

> i'm getting down to reviewing e-smith for a computer mag in
> sydney, australia, and would value some feedback from seasoned
> users

Dunno about seasoned users, but the comments from an experienced Windows user may be of use...

E-Smith is by far and away the easiest to install/run/maintain Linux server distribution I've ever looked at.  It's customisable, and the only time it's screwed up is when I've screwed it up myself...

I've had very few hardware problems with it - those "problems" I've had come from an insufficient knowledge of how to recompile the kernel, and are "problems" that come from RedHat 7.0, anyway.

The only (very) minor complaint is the lack of some system maintenance tools preinstalled, which you have to get out of another distribution.  E-Smith, however, have good reason for omitting these tools - security and simplicity.

> comments about uptime, problems with cable/adsl,

I can't comment on cable, but out of the box, it runs Bigpond ADSL without the slightest hint of a hiccup.

[Emory Smith]

We use E-smith in a ~80 user ad agency where the users typically send
emails with 5-20 MB attachments. This was causing our ex-mail server
(SLMail on win2k) to die 3-6 times a day. E-smith/qmail sits there
and says "Is that all you got?!".
That machine is also our secondary DNS server.

On a second e-smith box is our proxy (ipchains/Squid) that runs flawlessly.
The Squid logs show ~500,000 hits and ~1.3GB per week.
The old proxy was (you guessed it) a win2k box with WinProxy.
It would typically die once a day.

Both machines are Dell 350s. 1U rackmount boxen with P3/750 and 128MB RAM. 512 MB RAM was bought for each but I haven't had time to install it.

Emory

[Hazen Valliant-Saunders]

Well,
      I'm a net vetran.  I remember using DOS, OS/2, Win3.11 and NT and 95Beta and 98 and 98SE and 2KBeta3 & 4 and the Standard which still sucks when compared with any form of unix.

     As for Linux I've been playing around with it for about three years.  On and Off both professionally and privately.  OpenSource is the freeist form of solutions one can find.  E-smith is the Epitome of eleagance.  I've spent hours administiring BIND, MySQL, Apache and others (Like OpenLdap) and e-smith is the first system I've ever seen to take the run-around out of it all.  

    It is a very intellegent Linux distrobution, you may liken it to it's inspiration (Red Hat) but from experence I'm telling you theyre worlds diffrent.
    E-smith is simple has very specific tasks, and does them increadably well, out of all the firewalls I've seen it contains one if not the most robust and secure setup as far as external access is conserned.
   It will not do development however, if you really need to "Make" applications (on most distros of Nix the GNU comes standard) however not having these should prove to be a security benifit when conserned with what e-smith is designed to do.f

  All it needs now is a colabrative data object model (like say phpgroupware with models for exchange) and then watch it take out NT and 2K.    
  It's a night mare for raw application development, but for that debain or another GNU/OS tool would be used.

[Gordon Rowell]

Rob Hillis wrote:

> I can't comment on cable, but out of the box, it runs Bigpond
> ADSL without the slightest hint of a hiccup.

Thanks Rob. Instructions for BigPond Cable can be found at:

http://www.e-smith.org/bboard//read.php?v=t&f=3&i=3752&t=3749

This will become a HOWTO very soon.

Optus@Home works out of the box by choosing "DHCP - send hostname" in the console.

Gordon

[Rob Hillis]

Gordon Rowell wrote:

> > I can't comment on cable, but out of the box, it runs
> Bigpond
> > ADSL without the slightest hint of a hiccup.
> Thanks Rob. Instructions for BigPond Cable can be found at:
> http://www.e-smith.org/bboard//read.php?v=t&f=3&i=3752&t=3749

Cable doesn't worry me, because I can't get it...

> Optus@Home works out of the box by choosing "DHCP - send
> hostname" in the console.

Figured that one out pretty quick when I installed it for a friend recently.  I still find it amusing that Telstra specifically says "Linux operation of our services is not supported" when it's a hell of a lot easier to get it going under Linux than it is under Windoze...

[Alec Norek]

Re the comment - "Figured that one out pretty quick when I installed it for a friend recently. I still find it amusing that Telstra specifically says "Linux operation of our services is not supported" when it's a hell of a lot easier to get it going under Linux than it is under Windoze... "

The big difference is is that e-smith have made it easy. Try getting it going out of a Redhat Linux 7 box or FreeBSD...

[Rob Hillis]

Alec Norek wrote:

> Re the comment - "Figured that one out pretty quick when I
> installed it for a friend recently. I still find it amusing
> that Telstra specifically says "Linux operation of our
> services is not supported" when it's a hell of a lot easier
> to get it going under Linux than it is under Windoze... "
> The big difference is is that e-smith have made it easy. Try
> getting it going out of a Redhat Linux 7 box or FreeBSD...

Actually, once you work out that you're supposed to run the adsl-setup script, it's not that hard at all.  E-smith (and Mandrake) included it in the OS installation....

[robert slater]

Hello
This message is for those people wondering what machine you are testing on.

P111 866Mhz
Aopen AX33 133Mhz motherboard
128Mb PC-133 SDRAM
30Gb 7000 RPM hardrive
Acer 10/100 network cards [yes they work very well]
Aopen 8Mb graphics controller.

This our standard machine that we supply to clients as part of our package.


robert slater

sYnaptic solutions

[Jean-Guy]

I knew nothing about Linux when I started, a co-worker gave me the e-smith cd and told me to try it for my site. I installed it and now run 3 domains on it it's been up for almost 4 months non-stop! I am truly impressed with this product. It does everything I always wanted to do. here is the machine it's running on

P-90 with 64mb ram and a 1.2 gig hdd with a 3meg ADSL connection

my site takes about 300 visitors/day and no one notices it's running on a P90, I moved from a hosted site to in-house.

Jean-Guy

[Jason Ebacher]

I have  e-smith running on a gighz AMD and 768 MB of ram and the server will keep up with any thing the network will throw at it...even multiple huge file transfers, we back up the drives by doing a direct copy oner the 100bt network so we send over 30gigs over the network and no one even notices it at all...WOW

The other thing i have found with esmith is it does everything our Cobalt Qube does and more , it is a shame I didn't hear about it sooner..

We use our current esmith just as a file server...thats it but from the looks of it once we out grow the Qube we will be switching to a esmith server for web ftp and email server and then we will also be able to do other things like VPN etc.

Kudos to the e-smith team on a great product, i just cant wait till it includes the newest features that linux has to offer, like the new file system and kernals for i586 ..these features alone willl make it great, the other thing I would like is to see a easy set up to do routing of packets, We currently use a Freesco linux distro box to direct packets to diffrent ports, like, we have a webserver on 80 and another on webserver on 8080...this works but it would be nice to be included in esmith in a easy to set up fashion.

Just my two bucks...With gas prices as high as they are it is a drop in the bucket.
Jason

[Sergei Slobodov]

Well, I could be raving about e-smith for pages and pages, too, since I've got it installed in the office, at school and at home. But since all the responses so far have been way too sweet, I'd like to add a word of caution.

E-smith works great right out of the box (on compatible hardware). The learning curve to configure it through the console admin tools is minimal. But if you want to customize things, brace yourself! Templates are NOT for novices! (e-smith tells you as much). The documentation is sparse and the pitfalls are abound. I once spent three days just trying to enable DNS service over external network in server/gateway mode (disabled by default for security reasons - a good call).

Just stick to the defaults and you'll be laughing.

Regards,
Sergei