Topic: What do you use SME for and why?

[mapangojoe]

Hello All.  I'm writing to find out more about my fellow SME users.  I have been using SME for a few years now, and it is now the main server product our company installs.  I'm part owner of a small computer consulting company in a small resort town.  We do Windows repairs (mostly lame reinstalls, and virus/malware/trojan/worm/you get the point repairs) and also sell and service Linux and OSX based systems.  I have been servicing and selling Netware servers for 15+ years, but Netware and Novell solutions have been almost impossible to sell now, and we no longer have any customers still running Netware any more.  I try hard not to sell Windows servers ( I don't like supporting American corporate criminals, it's a personal thing you know!) altho we still occasionally still get requests for them.

In our tiny town, most networks have less than 10 users.  I have installed many SME servers on bare bones Duron boxes with 256MB of RAM that can be had on the net for a few hundred bucks.  I have also installed SME on bigger "server" type systems.  

I'm writing to get an idea of how others are using SME.  Are most of you just using it as a home server, or are many like me and using it professionally?  Your comments are welcome and I would love to hear your experiences with SME.

[MSmith]

Got 'em all over town here ... standalone mail server, standalone file server, backup server, gateway/router only, gateway/router/mailserver ... whatever SME will do, I have it doing somewhere.  It's been rock-solid for me and my clients ever since version 4.0 wayyyyy back when I discovered it.  I've  left the ones I install for business pretty much stock, but I've heavily customized the one that is my mail/file/gateway/router server and it's held up well (knock wood).  The ONLY difficulties I have had with stock SME servers have been hardware-related.  Ever.

Why?  Because it Just Works and because it's a great way to make use of hardware that would otherwise be discarded while avoiding the purchase of expensive new hardware and server software licenses.

I should note that when I recycle an old PC for use with SME, I always clean it up really well first, replace the power supply and CPU fans, add a case fan or two and install two new mirrored hard drives (unless it's a real throwaway use).  Following this procedure I've had uptimes in excess of a year in several cases.

[Janm]

Hi
I use it for a home server v.6.5rc1 with only a few extra rpm as a  
Standalone mail server,  file server, backup server, gateway/router/dhcp/dns/proxy.
I have tried to get my friends to use it but they ran screeming away they use windows boxes
I started to use it several years ago v.4 and then upgraded as the new versions came out.
I have used it on my work  on 3 danish Reed Cros Asylum where i was Tecnical Manager
for a coupple of years but they are closed now.
And tried to get a hosting company to use it http://fuzion.dk where i also worked for a while
but they also use  windows 2003 servers.
Now i try moses community server internal to se how it perform as wel.
All the best from
Jan Denmark  

[azche24]

Users in this forum run almost everything server-related on SME. From campus-wide servers with +500 Users to small home-servers with 2 users, a little filesharing and web-access.

SME will do all that, if you do not use flakey hardware. Web-poll here some time ago showed, that about 75 % of the installations are in a SOHO < 25 user environment. And that is, what SME was made for.

I use it in office as AllInOne for 8 users (with static IP, ADSL and quite heavy mail-traffic) and at home for family use (7b8 version, 4 user, little traffic).

On office-server we are running a german TAPI software AGFEO TK-SUITE on top of SME also. (Web/SQL software with COM-port interface to the PBX). It was quite hard to configure that, but it worked ever since.

I'm running e-smith/SME for years now and without any troubles, compared to MS NT, w2k and such.

The only point is: Do not change or "mod" your SME-installation too much. This will cause heavy problems, esp. with "roll-back" or upgrades.

And if you want to do very special tasks (a standalone faxserver, a customized router, advanced windoze fileserving or such) it could be useful to install another distro for that and leave out the whole SME template system, because it can be hard to configure the functions, that are not implemented in server-manager.