Topic: Getting Familiar with E-smith

[Jim Darrough]

Good Day.

     I have been using e-smith as a gateway server at home for several years, and am very pleased with its performance. It was easy to install and configure, and is pretty much turn-key but now I want to learn more about how it operates.

     In particular, I want to read about the basics, then delve into ways I can modify my server to do the things I want. I would also like to find out how I can filter out possible viruses, and maybe even go after spammers. Also, what firewall is available for the e-smith/SME system, preferably free.

     This is a very aggressive task I want to set for myself, and as such I would like opinions and constructive advice on where to look (books, web resources, etc.).

Thanks!

                     Jim Darrough

[Arkman]

Excellent Jim!

- Start here in the forums, then have a look at the Mitel/E-Smith developer documentation found on this site, then check out the community contributed how-to's, and if you are interested in helping with SME add-ons join the developer mailing list.
- In a more general vein SME is still linux under-the-hood so spend some time learning/researching linux. There are some really good "newbie" centric linux sites around as well as sites hosting linux how-to's. Learning linux is a good thing anyway, but is really important if you are going to go mucking about under-the-hood.
- After you've done some studying ask your questions either in this forum or others and some guru might give you a hand. (Note: Read the documentation first.)
- Firewall - If you are running your SME server in gateway/server mode then you already have one my friend. If you want something else then checkout IPCop.
- And above all...Have fun....and contribute.

[Jim Darrough]

Thanks so much for your kind reply.

I have been "playing" with Linux since about five years ago. My first experience was getting Slackware version 1.x running on an old '386. I learned about compiling the kernel, and adding different hardware. Did a lot of reinstalls those days.

Now my favorite version is Mandrake 8.2. I do admit that I also use Windows XP but primarily as a game engine. I was getting so many viruses using Windows that I was happy to switch over to Linux-based browsers and email. I now use Netscape version 7 (I think it's 7) for Linux as my browser and email program at home. Haven't convinced the folks here at work yet though.

I will indeed check out the how-tos. And thanks again for your comments.

Regards, Jim

[Bill Talcott]

You can find out about SME's custom templates at http://www.e-smith.org/custom/. If you're familiar with Linux already, you should be good to go once you learn the templates. Basically there is a directory containing fragments of all the configuration files. You then run a command to build all those fragments into the actual files. There is also a templates-custom directory, where you can put all your modifications. These fragments here have priority over the regular templates, so your mods will be used instead of the defaults when you expand your config files. If you want to customize a file, you just find the templates dir for that file, find the fragment you want to change, and put the modified copy in the same location under the templates-custom dir. Expand, and your modified config file is produced. If you want to undo it, just delete your modified fragment and expand the file again.

I have literally less than a day's experience with Linux before SME (started with e-smith 4.12). Between these phorums, the contribs, and linuxnewbie.org I've been able to accomplish everything I've tried to do with SME.

[Les Mikesell]

The main problem with custom modifications to e-smith is that you have to understand the underlying system configuration files and avoiding them may be the reason you wanted e-smith in the first place.  You also have to understand both shell scripts and perl and perhaps figure out some of the keys available in the configuration and accounts databases.  Then you can make make your own custom templates to the perl snippets that build the config files - and hope that the next update doesn't conflict with them.  My luck hasn't been that great in that department...    But, as far as firewalling goes, what you get out of the box probably won't need any changes and the templating approach builds belt-and-suspenders layers of ipchains, anti-spoofing rules, tcpwrappers, and individual application rules for samba, etc. that would be hard to match by hand.