Windows And Linux Integration Hands-on Solutions for a Mixed Environment - 2005 publication.

Overview

In Chapter 1, we described a very typical evolution of many companies. Let's briefly revisit and adorn the story of what happens in many typical companies. We'll review the story in three acts:

• Act I: It arrives

  • Unix arrives. Then Linux arrives. The Unix/Linux camp "owns" DNS for corp.com and provides a myriad of services to the Unix/Linux user base.

  • Windows comes next . Along with it come NT domains, then Active Directory domains.

• Act II: E-mail abounds

  • Linux e-mail services are used to support the installed Linux user base. The Linux administrator sets up a simple e-mail server (which is precisely what we'll do in this chapter). All the Linux users get e-mail addresses such as user @corp.com .

  • Windows users also want e-mail services. At first they try the simple e-mail services on Linux, but then they give Exchange a try. During the testing, the CEO falls in love with the centralized message storage, shared calendaring, and public folders in Exchange. Exchange gets anointed as the standard for most of the organization. However, even though Exchange is installed in ad.corp.com , the CEO wants all Exchange users to have e-mail addresses in the form of user @corp.com .

• Act III: Growth and stagnation

  • Active Directory becomes the primary account storage for all users whether they utilize Windows or Linux.

  • The CEO wants everyone to use Exchange e-mail whenever possible.

  • Some Linux users have work processes that require them to continue to use the Linux e-mail server.

Let's pause for a second and take a look at Figure 6.1, which demonstrates this current state of affairs. That is, two camps, two e-mail servers, and not much else. We're going to be setting up this scenario in this chapter and solving the associated interoperability problems.

Figure 6.1: Both Windows and Linux camps have independent e-mail systems that don't really talk to each other.

We have several major problems to solve:

• We need a way to unify our mail so that everyone has a corp.com e-mail address, which will present some challenges:

  • The CEO wants Exchange to be the primary method of e-mail for corp.com , but Exchange e-mail "lives" in ad.corp.com .

  • The Linux e-mail server currently hosts mailboxes for a bunch of users who already have corp.com e-mail addresses and who cannot move off the Linux e-mail server.

• Spam and e-mail viruses are flowing in from the Internet at an alarming rate. You need to set up an inexpensive e-mail spam and anti-virus gateway.

We'll work through this scenario in several steps and grow our e-mail environment to make use of the best features in Exchange and Linux e-mail:

• We'll set up Linux as a departmental e-mail server for corp.com .

• We'll install Exchange.

• We'll set up another Linux machine to act as a unified gateway between our Linux and Windows e-mail servers as well as make it an anti-spam and anti-virus gateway to the Internet.

This is going to be fun!