[FatBastard]

We have a fractional T (756 or so) for three small companies (40 people). I need an internal FTP server so clients can upload .jpg photos (around 50 megs).

Here comes the battle! I’m up against the PC IT people and they are going to suggest a Windows server. I need to know if I’ll be able to Host on an Xserver: Three websites (very basic, except for one has .asp pages), Hosting Three e-mail domains, internal fileserver (for mac only) and ftp services. ????

Is it possible? What will it take (i.e. additional firewall requirements, larger pipe)? How involved will the administration be?

Currently we are outsourcing all of the web hosting and e-mail. I need all the help I can get to form a viable proposal to compete. I want a win for the mac depatment. I'm sick of loosing out and forced to live in a Windows world.

Thanks in advance,

Mr. FatBastard

[Scotttheking]

Cost (both initial and administrative) and security would be my two selling points.

I would not have a file server and web server be the same box.
ASP, not sure if a mac can host, but why not try and get it redone in php? Someone else will have to answer if the mac can do asp.
Multiple websites is not a big deal.
Someone else will have to say if apple's mail server can do virtual domains.

[Camelot]

Originally posted by FatBastard:
We have a fractional T (756 or so) for three small companies (40 people). I need an internal FTP server so clients can upload .jpg photos (around 50 megs).

Here comes the battle! I?m up against the PC IT people and they are going to suggest a Windows server. I need to know if I?ll be able to Host on an Xserver: Three websites (very basic, except for one has .asp pages), Hosting Three e-mail domains, internal fileserver (for mac only) and ftp services. ????

Is it possible? What will it take (i.e. additional firewall requirements, larger pipe)? How involved will the administration be?

Currently we are outsourcing all of the web hosting and e-mail. I need all the help I can get to form a viable proposal to compete. I want a win for the mac depatment. I'm sick of loosing out and forced to live in a Windows world.

Thanks in advance,

Mr. FatBastard

ASP is probably the big kicker there.

The fact is that almost any machine nowadays, even a regular PowerMac running Mac OS X (not Mac OS X Server) can do what you want, but if the .asp pages are using something like Visual Basic, then you're out of luck - they'll need to be rewritten to work on anything other than IIS.

FWIW, Apple's Mail server does not support multiple domains, but there are several alternative servers that do, so don't let that stop you.

The virtual domains under Apache are not a problem. You can easily run three (or more) sites off a single server.

The size of the pipe is a factor of what you do, not what server is doing it. You'll need to examine how much data you plan on uploading to determine whether the pipe is big enough for you.

As Scott already mentioned, security is probably going to be your biggest plus. IIS is the biggest piece of **** when it comes to web server security - it's so full of holes and can be a nightmare to maintain.

Just remember than any Mac-based server is going to be immune to CodeRed, Nimda, SQL Slammer, and all the other recent (Windows-centric) internet worms/attacks. Can your PC administrators say the same thing about their server?

[Rainy Day]

ASP, not sure if a mac can host, but why not try and get it redone in php? Someone else will have to answer if the mac can do asp.

"asp2php converts WWW Active Server Pages (ASP) files that run on the Microsoft IIS Web Server into PHP pages to run on Apache."

Apple's Mail server does not support multiple domains, but there are several alternative servers that do, so don't let that stop you.

sendmail, which ships with MacOS X, can be used to serve multiple domains. May or may not be a solution for you, depending on how many users/traffic you expect.

As Scott already mentioned, security is probably going to be your biggest plus. IIS is the biggest piece of **** when it comes to web server security - it's so full of holes and can be a nightmare to maintain.

That's sure an understatement! Once i turned on my server, poked a few holes in the firewall, and looked at the logs, i saw a couple dozen attempts daily to try to compromise my system. Upon researching the attacks, all turned out to be attacks against Windoze based servers. Only a fool would willingly put up a WIndoze based server.