More Donated Server News

Well I have gotten one of the donated servers fired up.  It’s a dual Xeon 2.0 GHZ HT with dual 36 gig 10 SCSI hdd’s in raid 1.  This is now running Untangle as the firewall.  This frees up the Dell server (which is a Xeon 3.0 GHZ HT 2 gig dual 250 gigs SATA disks) box to run Centos 5.5 64 bit.  I then installed Zimbra 64 bit.  If i get final approval this will be the church’s new mail server.  All users will get 2 gigs for their mailbox and they will finally be able to reduce the cost of Office.  The church only uses excel and word.  Not having to use the pro suite means they can cut our office costs by more than half(unless they want publisher).  This will also solve the mail reliability problems they have been complaining about for quite some time.  This will also mean their mail is not stored on their local machines AND they can have all the shared contacts and calendars they can have with exchange for a cost of…..ZERO.  NO windows license, no windows CALS, no exchange license, no exchange CALS.  I had to bend on one “requirement”.  It will “integrate” with AD but it doesn’t pull the users automatically.  You still have to manually provision user accounts.  Kinda makes AD connections useless.  However it was so far ahead of everything else in other features I let that one go.  This represents a savings of about $500 or more.  We can add users to the limit of the box and the church does NOT have to pay MS more $$$ when we add users..:)  Once Samba is able to do GPO’s the windows server goes away for good..:)