Converting my office to [Gentoo] Linux...

[AdamMil]

For those experienced sysadmins out there:

I've been running GNU/Linux for quite some time now, and recently converted to GNU/Linux from my own hacked-together "distribution". I feel inspired to try to convert my office (or at least the servers) to GNU/*nix, in the greatest way possible, using Gentoo Linux. I have a goodly amount of experience with basic security, administration, etc, but have never tried to take on a project of this magnitude. It's a small company here (maybe 5 workstations and 13 servers). I have been seeding the idea of migrating to a *nix based setup, and the other developers/network guys are turned onto the idea. However, management will surely shoot down the idea if the system ended up being more difficult to maintain or administer than the current Win2000-based network, or has other problems.

For those who don't want to read about the current setup, I'll briefly state my thoughts here, and hope that somebody will have some ideas or improvements. Then I'll describe the current setup.

1) The system will need a centralized method of authenticating users. My first idea was to have the files in /etc that deal with passwords be links to files on a central NFS mount. However, there may be PAM modules (or something else) to do this better, and I don't know about NFS locking issues (though two people changing their passwords at the same time is unlikely.. . I'd like it to be as simple as possible (dealing with simple files over a database or LDAP server, for instance).

2) The system will need a way to centralize most libraries and applications. I think linking certain /etc files and the /usr tree to NFSs would be good enough, with server-specific applications in /usr/local. I'd also like to link /home over an NFS.

3) For remote administration, I was thinking of using sshd.

4) The servers connected to the internet (pretty much all of them...) should have some kind of soft firewall. iptables?

5) For backup, I think a nightly cron task running on the backup server would be sufficient.

6) For web development, I think Frontpage extensions on apache would be workable. Does anybody know of a CVS source-control plugin for Visual Studio 6 that would allow the developers to transparently use Visual Interdev on Windows 2000 with the Linux web and CVS servers?

7) Interop with the Win2k network would probably be done using Samba.

I'm probably missing something...

The current network is set up as follows:
There are 6 production servers (2 web, 1 database, 1 dns, 1 exchange, 1 domain controller) on a Qwest DSL line. Each server has two network cards, and both an external and internal IP. There are 5 development servers (1 web, 1 database, 1 dns, 1 exchange, 1 domain controller) on a Pacbell DSL line, each with two network cards. So there are three subnets.. the Qwest net, the Pacbell net, and the internal subnet. There are 2 other servers (1 phone server - routes telephone calls, and a server that can take the role of other servers in case of failure). The production and development servers are in two different NT domains (PROD and DEV, I'll call them).

Then, there are 5 workstations (5 actually used), each with an account on both domains. It's clear that the workstations will not be converted.. the other three people in the office would not put up with learning the GNU OS, and I don't know if anything could take the place of Exchange 2000, so there will need to be a hybrid system.

[klieber]