Topic: e-smith configuration for US Navy ship

[Chris Horner]

Congratulations, it looks like you have an interesting and useful product.  
It looks like e-smith may be what I need at work.  I administer the LAN on a US Navy ship, and I need something simple to install and operate.  My experience with systems administration is fairly deep, but my replacement may not be, so ease of use is very important.  Because our network is on the ship we have some unusual additional requirements for a gateway server.  I'm hoping that you might be able to answer a few questions I have about e-smith.

1.  Can the software handle more than one external interface?  When the ship is in port we will have a router connected to a fiber line for an outside connection, but when underway, we will only have a single (EXTREMELY SLOW) dial-up connection.  It would be neccesary to switch interfaces, from ethernet to dial-on-demand, and it would be nice (but not neccesary) to do it automatically.

2.  Can I restrict use of HTTP/FTP/etc on a per machine basis?  I'd like to be able to restrict who can surf the web, who can download files.  This is particularly important in view of our slow connection at sea.

3.  Is it possible to drop an imap server into e-smith?  We currently run an internal-only web-interface imap mail system, and it would be nice to continue with that functionality (and I don't have to retrain all the users).

Thanks,

Chris Horner

[Joseph Morrison]

Hi Chris, Re: NAVY SHIP: Thanks for your posting! The e-smith server and gateway does meet your ease of use requirement, and may be a good fit to your situation. However, you would have to customize it to handle your requirements. (1) We currently do not handle multiple external interfaces, but if you have enough Linux expertise to implement that with Red Hat Linux, you can do it with e-smith equally easily. You would also have to modify our dial-on-demand component to dial out less frequently (we will be providing more user-level control over this in the next version). (2) Restricting HTTP/FTP etc. is not supported in the user interface, but can be done fairly easily by editing configuration files. (3) We are exploring IMAP solutions for e-smith and hope to include support for IMAP in our next version. If you decide to proceed with the e-smith solution, you may want to consider purchasing our developer partnership, which entitles you to technical support from us as you customize your e-smith software.