Mandrake Corporate Server 3.0: Server software made easy

While I generally like Mandrake a little better than Red Hat, I am not totally convinced that this the best Linux server solution to go with. Based on what I am reading, it seems a little problematic to me.

Mandrakesoft released its Corporate Server 3.0 product in February. It’s a significant upgrade to the older 2.1 edition. With a newer kernel and a competent GUI management utility for its services, Corporate Server 3.0 is a good, inexpensive choice for businesses that need a powerful and secure server operating system with as little overhead as possible.

If you’re used to Mandrake’s desktop distributions, Corporate Server 3.0’s default configuration will be a bit of a change. While you can manually add KDE and GNOME packages during the installation process, only the IceWM and twm window managers are installed by default. Your default console is a Galaxy-themed, bare-bones IceWM with no desktop applications. All you’ve got is the Mandrake Control Center with its GUI administrative tools, including setup wizards for all of the servers you’ve installed. If you choose to install all of the predefined package sets, you’ll have a helper wizard for DHCP, DNS, FTP, news, groupware, OpenLDAP, email, proxy, Samba, time, Web, NIS/autofs, and installation servers as well as PXE configuration for network booting. For most of these wizards you don’t have to know much about the technologies to start and configure them, but you do have to know what they are and what they do.

Postfix 2.1.1 with cyrus-imap are the default mail packages, and Apache 2.0.48, Samba 3.0.6, ProFTPd 1.2.9, BIND 9.2.3, and OpenLDAP 2.1.25 are among the network applications. SpamAssassin and SquirrelMail are installed with the mail server package group, but there is no other mail transfer agent (MTA) option besides Postfix. [Read the rest]