Suggested Books & Guides on small bisiness LAN with FreeBSD

[Per olof Ljungmark]

Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
> wmc20 at bellsouth.net wrote:
>> Hi Guys,
>>
>> I'm looking for advice or suggestions on how to [re]design a small
>> business network with FreeBSD.  I know that's a pretty broad topic --
>> I'm not looking for a simple answer, so much as reference materials.
>>
>> Background:  for over 5 years we've had our business running with a
>> few FreeBSD servers.  An external Internet connected box serves smtp,
>> imap, http, ftp, dns (external and LAN internal) and http-proxy.
>> Another server (on LAN behind NAT router) has Samba file & print
>> services, lpd and some other things.
>>
>> I guess what I'm looking for is "best practice" suggestions for
>> configuring all this optimally.  Problems we have currently include
>> DNS -- if the Internet connection goes down, the server chokes, and
>> we can't even get internal DNS.  And security issues, eg:  should the
>> email accounts reside on an Internet-exposed server?
>>
>> O'Reilly sells "Windows to Linux Migration Toolkit" which sounds like
>> some of what I'm looking for, except that it's for Linux -- but I've
>> dabbled with that kludge enough to probably apply the concepts to
>> FreeBSD  ;)  Any other suggestions on good books, web sites, etc?
> 
> Hi.
> 
> A book that covers both the OS and the services into real detail would 
> be like a a few thousand pages - there is no such thing. For DNS, you 
> need  the Cricket Book (DNS and BIND), for other services you need other 
> books. However, a combination of the FreeBSD handbook and the usually 
> excellent man pages takes you a long way!
> 
> For the mail server, if you need connectivity from outside, yes, you 
> need to expose it, if not, mail can just be routed to the insisde. 
> Properly set up there should not be a problem exposing it though - most 
> mail servers are built to do just that. As the administrator it's your 
> obligation to keep the stuff updated so that any security holes are 
> fixed before too late.
> 
I should have mentioned that the O'Reilly book takes you quite a long 
way - after all, we are cousins.

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