[David Lee]

I am associated with a small co. that will be setting up a mail and file server, and as this is our first try at this we have some basic questions. 1. Do we need to purchase OS X Server system or will Panther 10.3.3 suffice? We need to set up a secure mail - separate account gor each person, maybe 15 people - and file server (G4 Tower) for people across an area the size of California, sometime needing to send files too big to send as mail attachments. 2. Can we set up Panther so that FTP file transfers work? 3. Is there a better solution than FTP? Sorry for the basic questions but we are not networking experts, just long time Mac users. Any help appreciated.

[OreoCookie]

If it's just small office files, it will suffice your needs. For comparison: I have a small Pentium 1 200 in my parents' office doing all that. Your machine is much faster than this methusalem.

The question about the OS: Yes, Panther can do everything just fine. It depends on how much Unix you want to learn/you already know. Don't worry, with webmin, you can do almost everything with a GUI, if you wish.

If you insist on Apple's GUI tools, then you can still buy OS X Server.

As for the remote access, you could use sftp, there are some GUIs out there. Basically, it is similar to ftp, but everything is encrypted.

[Snellfharer]

Look here

Can do all that and is easily configurable trough web interface (actually it's webiterface only).

Just a tip...

[tooki]

A tool you might find to be highly useful (if plain-vanilla OS X's configuration tools aren't enough) is a package called WebMin. It creates a web interface to pretty much every UNIX thing in the OS.

www.webmin.com

OS X server has its own interfaces, some of which are very refined, others are kinda geeky. But as far as performance, you won't really see a difference.

I've never set up a mail server before, so I can't really competently talk about it.

tooki