Topic: What is the best practice for many SME servers in 1 company

[etherNut]

I have a client who is very happy with SME Servers. They have decided to expand their operation throughout the country and will be opening 10 branches. They want to use DSL to interconnect the branches, but still want to have the shared files and email at head office. What is the best practice for doing this considering the following:

1) The only affordable data lines are DSL, but the Telco caps the upload at 384k
2) The monthly internet cap is 8GB per site
2) There is users at all the branches that need to work on the same files (mostly visio drawings for projects). Samba sharing has proven to be too slow for multiple users.
3) The company wants to keep the same domain name for all users, but I would like to limit the VPN traffic, so a local mail server would be better.

[kevinb]

In response to the second item 2 ... I would strongly recommend Subversion and TortoiseSVN on the clients (if Windows). Either the SVN add on for SME or you can get SVN hosting for ~$10 / month.

Kevin

[meanpenguin]

1) The only affordable data lines are DSL, but the Telco caps the upload at 384k

That is going to be hard to support 10 offices. 
Even if you only have a star topology, with a centralized email will eat up much of that 384K link, especially with attachments.
(Do you know what your actual max uplink speed is.  384K by is the max, many locations can't even make that speed,
 Read your contract, "at least 384K" or "up to 384K")

2) The monthly internet cap is 8GB per site

You need to estimate the traffic.  Based it on how big of a file your are working with (File size * 2 (open and save), then double it as minimum)

2) There is users at all the branches that need to work on the same files (mostly visio drawings for projects). Samba sharing has proven to be too slow for multiple users.

It's not samba that is too slow.  There is no solution except to get more bandwidth.
384K  is approx 40KBytes / sec.  If you have a 1  MByte file, it's going to take at least 25+ seconds to open the file (if you have nothing else using the link, and with no VPN, add VPN and it's going to get slower)

3) The company wants to keep the same domain name for all users, but I would like to limit the VPN traffic, so a local mail server would be better.

That's not a problem, but all internet traffic (in and out) email still needs to go through a central server.
Local email will be handled by the local server.
Otherwise, you would need   bob@site1.domain.com,  jane@site2.domain.com 

Good Luck,
Ed

[Stefano]

I have a client who is very happy with SME Servers. They have decided to expand their operation throughout the country and will be opening 10 branches. They want to use DSL to interconnect the branches, but still want to have the shared files and email at head office. What is the best practice for doing this considering the following:

1) The only affordable data lines are DSL, but the Telco caps the upload at 384k
2) The monthly internet cap is 8GB per site
2) There is users at all the branches that need to work on the same files (mostly visio drawings for projects). Samba sharing has proven to be too slow for multiple users.
3) The company wants to keep the same domain name for all users, but I would like to limit the VPN traffic, so a local mail server would be better.

Hi, just an idea.

in the central office you have sme server and another server with Centos or Ubuntu with freenx server installed.. files, email and users credentials reside on sme

in the branch offices users connect to the central one with freenx client.. in this way, you don't need a server in every office.. naturally sme and centos hw must be very affordable.

My 2 c

Ciao
Stefano

[mercyh]

I don't see how it will work if you are actually going to try and share the files in realtime over the vpn. You just don't have enough bandwidth. If you could at least get a better connection at the head office it would maybe be possible. (If I were doing 10 branches connected to the head office I would want at least 3mb dedicated bandwidth at the head office location.)
 

Your limitation is not Samba or SME, it is bandwidth.

[dmay]

As has been clearly pointed out, your WAN bandwidth and monthly traffic surcharges will be a hurtle to overcome. I would take a look into deploying wide-area data service (WDS) accelerators at all offices. This may reduce or even completely elliminate the need for remote servers. Here is one potential manufacturer to consider:

http://www.riverbed.com

Darrell

[etherNut]

First of all, thank you for all your replies. At least it was not a resounding 'not possible'.

I am very keen to see SME server grow among small business users as it is my intention to use some of the support revenue to fund the development of new features that would close the gap on MS Small Business Server. That is why I am using this client as a proverbial 'guinea pig' to see what would be required to make the solution work over a wan. The local Telco here in South Africa upgraded all the 4meg lines to a maximum of 512k upload over the last weekend. Still not enough, so the Riverbed product will have to be investigated. But this is what I have done on the first branch so far:

1) HQ and Branch have 1 x ipcop and 1 x SME Server each
2) The needed shared files are both at HQ and the branch, and a rsync update is done every night to sync both sides. Not very elegant as yet, but the client understands the risks of 2 users working on the same file on a given day.
3) Branch user accounts are synchronised with HQ every hour using dirty tools
4) Incoming mail is delivered to HQ, and branch fetchmails from HQ. This allows for the same domain to be used across branches, but also means that there is a delay for non-hq users to receive mail. Branch mail is also forwarded to HQ for sorting. Also not very elegant, but acceptable for now (or until a better method is found).
5) Internet is local breakout and ipcop prioritises other traffic over mail.
6) The VPN is thus used only for email, hourly password updates and daily file syncs.

New Questions:
1) Is there a way to implement something like Fedora Directory server so that accounts are synchronised automatically?
2) Is there a way to 'lock' the file at HQ if the same file in the same Ibay at branch is being edited?
3) Is there a way to still allow local sorting of email for the local users and then send the remainder of the emails to HQ?

[dmay]

You may find once you investigate WDS that remote servers are no longer needed. Hence all your questions will be irrelevant. The one thing you do not mention is size of remote office workforce but in general if remote offices are small, no server is needed.

Using WDS you sync and locally cache onto the WDS hard drive only requested by end user files. This is typically a fraction of all daily created/modified files. Hence reduced file traffic/cost.

Using WDS you may find remote imap mail works similar to local speeds. Hence all remote users will use imap. No need to worry about multiple e-mail servers fetching all e-mail traffic across your WAN. The only traffic will be user initiated read e-mail. Hence reduced e-mail traffic/cost.

Darrell