Topic: Suggestions for future versions...

[hdaei]

First, thanks for a great project.  I found this several years ago before it was open source, and moved on to other things.  I'm very proud/glad/happy Mitel opened this priject up.  It provides for so many others to now use this (small busniness, mom & pop, non-profits, churches, etc.)  Thanks again!

-- begin rant --
This is meant as a brain-storming session... this is not all inclusive, nor is it intended to discount any other ideas.  I've found it much easier to be overly open and creative first, and then reign the ideas into a manageable form.
--end rant--

A Vision for the Future of SME server.

Goal:
   Create a mission statement for the project, what exactly SME is supposed to   be...  Ease of installation and use... (This is one of the reasons M$ has done so    well in the market.)  A total server solution for businesses up to 500 people?

Package Base:
   Tao Linux / White Box Linux... pick one of the community (free)versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0.

Things to Add:  
   -  SE Enhanced kernel?  (Adamantics style patching / lockdown?)
   - Stateful firewall, like Smoothwall Community Edition, ipcop, or Clarkconnect... security first!  IDS (snort, acid, etc) (Add secure email    settings... on by default!)  Set SSH to protocol 2 only by default, ask installer for key length during installation, suggest 1024?  Add tab to server-manager page allowing these changes.
   - “Approved” / “Certified” contribs.
   - Updates (yum?) custom to SME.
   - Many more packages installed by default (ClamAV, Spamassassin, mrtg, AWStats, OpenGroupware, etc) with “tabs” on the server-manager page...  It may be easier to have and certify a whole bunch of apps, and then allow the manager to “turn them off” / deactivate them. <-- create new tab on the server-manager page showing everything installed, and allowing the manager to activate / deactivate things.
   - Better backup scheme / utility... support removable USB2 / firewire drives?
   - update all packages, MySQL, Samba, etc.

Install Information:
   Allow user to enter business informantion (name, address, etc) during the install, and use that information for both LDAP and all the SSL certificates that are created.

Workgroups...
   What about supporting linux desktops as well?  (Yoper, SuSE, Fedora, etc)  Should we tie into samba, or use NIS, or something else?  What does Novell have?  Are they (Novell) going to open source it?  What can we learn from how Novell is doing things?  If they are going to open source things, perhaps we should look at using their networking client server solution instead of samba, for security reasons...
Terminal services... rumor has it Novell is looking into LTSP... is this something we might also want to add?

-- Please post more ideas or refinements of these as you feel.

[hdaei]

What about adding certificates?  

Is it more trouble than it's worth?

Is anyone sponsoring an open CA?

Also, what about providing native IM support, as well as voice?  H323 service?

[hdaei]

What about adding in some of the items included with IPCop.org or redwall.sourceforge.net?  

Redwall seems to have a very robust WEB Caching / Filtering / Proxy package and a thorough Mail Relaying / SPAM filtering / Virus Scanning package.  Also, they do appear to do a good job with logging and reporting.

I would also like to see SME gain QOS.  This would really help the offices that are sharing a small WAN link.

Anyone else have any thoughts?

[satovey]

I want to see the 2.6 kernel implemented.
This should take care of most hardware
incompatabiltiy issues.

Mostly, I want to be able to boot my server
from the CD so I can instal e-smith on the
hardware it is going to be run on. I have
tried holding the control key down while
booting, but all I get is a server panic
when booting from the CD Install disk.

I want to be able to install onto my
160 gig hardrive and run it. Currently
I am not able to do this because the
cd won't boot on my machine.

I have a pc chips board with a 650 duron
procesor and 256 meg of ram. This board is
not new. In fact it's at least two years old
tech wise if not older. However, none of the
install cd's will boot on this machine.

Lilo needs to be configured with lba32 set as
default. I think though that the sme7.0 release
that http://lordsfam.net is working on will do
most of what we want hardware wise.

It would be nice if more people could help him.
Development wise, I'm useless. I can hack perl
and some programming here and there, but to get
involved with the development of a distro would
hold up the release date.

Take care guys. You hve my suggestions.

[martinhick]

I would like to see the Fetchnmail POP3 retrieval included as standard.

On the subject of firewlls, Guard Dog has some nice features and is easy to use.

Martin