A word about money
Before looking at what I chose and why, it’s worth looking at the budget I had for this project. In moving away from Windows I was writing off a sizeable (for an individual) chunk of change invested in the server operating systems and software. My goal was to replace software that was proving far too costly – in management time and poor reliability – with functional alternatives that would be easier to manage and less costly to run – in both time and pounds sterling!
My Microsoft server environment harks back to my time as owner of an international software development company. In company terms, a few thousand pounds spent on something as essential as email and company-wide network access controls is small change. At garage level, those costs are witheringly unaffordable. To be fair to Microsoft, If I were starting from scratch and buying an MS server environment, their Small Business Server (SBS) product provides most of what I need. For $600 per copy I’d get the base OS, Exchange Server and a primitive firewall. This would buy me 5 user licences which barely covers my needs and once you exceed this figure, costs start to escalate enormously – especially as I’d be buying licences twice over (once for each server) or have to forego the backup and security of the two-server approach I was used to.
I set a purely arbitrary budget figure of $500 for my Linux replacements – as much to see what could be achieved for this small sum as to keep expenditure in scale with income. Xandros Server fit this budget pretty well (for a single server licence with Scalix email thrown in) and would have only exceeded it slightly once a second OS licence had been purchased. But, Xandros didn’t work.
Time to rethink the way to spend the budget.
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