From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Feb 25 15:22: 8 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.the-i-pa.com (mail.the-i-pa.com [151.201.71.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5827737B41B for ; Mon, 25 Feb 2002 15:22:04 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 46020 invoked from network); 25 Feb 2002 23:29:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO proxy.pt.com) (151.201.71.209) by mail.the-i-pa.com with SMTP; 25 Feb 2002 23:29:23 -0000 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Bill Moran Organization: Potential Technology To: Steve Brown , freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Can FreeBSD do this... Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 18:20:50 -0500 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: <20020225225248.HDT27257.tomts11-srv.bellnexxia.net@there> In-Reply-To: <20020225225248.HDT27257.tomts11-srv.bellnexxia.net@there> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <02022518205000.01642@proxy.pt.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Monday 25 February 2002 17:52, Steve Brown wrote: > Hi there, > > Someone I know works in a small office (7 Wintels), they are looking for a > file/print server and internet gateway. Just to get a general idea, should > they > > a) consider a (Netgear or equiv) broadband router whose wan side is on > internet and one machine behind it is a FreeBSD machine running Samba > (file/print sharing is what Samba's for, right?) -OR- > > b) the FreeBSD machine acts as a gateway as well, no BB router? Can it do > this and file/print serving? > > Decent security required (sensitive personal info involved, but no > e-commerce). > > The proposal they've been offered involves a BB router, everyone behind it, > including a Win2000 server. This would involve $1700 to Microsoft for > licences. Would it be worth it to use an opensource solution or would it > cost more than that for them to pay someone to figure out how to do it with > FreeBSD? I've set these kind of things up and it would cost a good bit less to do it with FreeBSD than $1700 in software. Setting this stuff up in FreeBSD isn't terribly difficult, a competent sysadmin can do it in an afternoon. You have 3 basic costs: Hardware: about the same, FreeBSD or MS, although FreeBSD will normally perform the same on less powerful hardware Software: $1700 for MS, $0 for FreeBSD Setup time: Probably about the same cost for either FreeBSD or MS, except the FreeBSD system will work reliably for quite a while, while I've never seen a Windows system that would run in this capacity for any length of time without handholding from the sysadmin. It should be possible, but I've never seen it (I think it's a problem with the Windows sysadmins more than Windows itself) Hell, if you installed the base system and plugged it into the internet, I could ssh in and configure the whole thing the next day. -- Bill Moran Potential Technology technical services http://www.potentialtech.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message