Suggested Books & Guides on small bisiness LAN with FreeBSD

[Lane]

On Wednesday 29 November 2006 14:52, 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?
>
>   -Wayne B.
>
>
Wayne,

If you've been using FreeBSD in production for five years, you are probably 
well beyond any O'Reilley offering, imho.

We can all benefit by (yet) another look at "man <topic>," and that's probably 
gonna be your most productive resource, since it will allow you to address 
your specific issues without having to read any ol' dumbed-down version of 
the documentation :)

As for DNS issues, my thought is that if your external DNS server works then 
leave it alone and implement a separate internal DNS server to handle your 
internal traffic.  Just start with the same configuration you have on 
external and tweak it as needed.  It doesn't have to be authoritative.  Also 
you are likely also running DHCP, which I'd recommend you move from your 
external DNS server to the new internal DNS server (if that is your current 
setup).

Usually 2 cents, but free for you!

lane