Question

Imagine you have a spare desktop machine with an Intel Pentium IV 2.8 GHz (32-bit) CPU, 2 GB RAM memory and 512 GB storage memory. This machine is connected to the internet using your home internet router. You would like to use this machine to host:

• i.a personal web server
• ii.a personal email server
• iii.a personal database server.

How you would proceed to select and configure these servers? Your discussion must cover the following points:

• The name of the Linux distribution you choose. Give two key features supporting your choice.

• List at least two possible implementations for each server, recommending one with a brief reason for your choice.

• Outline how you would prepare, install, configure and confirm that each server was running.

Write no more than 400 words for this question.

Answer 1

Here in this case, I would rather go for the red hat enterprise linux distribution as it comes with several features that can be useful for the configuration of the services that we need to install and run. RHEL provides several other features such as global package repositories from where all the packages related to install a particular services are found. Other feature include the security provided by the red hat distribution linux is better as compared to the other distribution such as debian or suse. SELINUX is one such security services provided by RHEL.

Possible implementation of the web server:
1. When you want to run out website in your system, then the most important configuration your system should have is a web server installed in it. The web server can be implemented by installing the apache web server package into your system.
2. Secondly, the web server can help installed from the binaries by downloading the binaries from the official page of apache.
But out of the two, the first implementation of the web server is the easiest and the best way to install apache on your system.

Possible implementation of the email server:
1. In order to send and receive mail from your system you need to have or make the system as the SMTP server such that you can able to send mail. For that implementation also RHEL provides its own package to make the system a SMTP server. Using "yum" or "rpm" the package can be installed.
2. For mailing system, it is important that your system should have configured with the SMTP. Even RHEL provides the feature of installing it onto your system using third party mailing server also.
But it is recommended to install Red Hat's own SMTP package to configure your server as the SMTP server.

Possible implementation of a DB server:
1. Recent red hat distribution comes up with its own database that is Maria DB, which can be easily installed using the yum command and you can create tables easily with that database. Moreover, you can use that database to run your small application as well.
2. Another implementation is that you can even install other enterprise level databases such as Oracle and for implementation you need to perform other steps.
But as per the scenario, and as per the server configuration is concerned, it is better to go with the database provided by the red hat only.

Installation of web server:
yum install httpd
systemctl start httpd.service
To check whether it is running or not:
systemctl status httpd.service

Installation of SMTP server on RHEL:
yum update && yum install postfix
systemctl start postfix
systemctl enable postfix
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=smtp
configuring the server in /etc/postfix/main.cf
Give all the correct information about your server
setsebool -P allow_postfix_local_write_mail_spool on
systemctl restart postfix
In order to check whether it is configured properly or not:
check whether mail command is working or not.

installation of database server:
First you need to create a repo
vi /etc/yum.repos.d/mariadb.repo
[mariadb]
name = MariaDB
baseurl = http://yum.mariadb.org/5.5/rhel7-amd64/
gpgkey=https://yum.mariadb.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-MariaDB
gpgcheck=1
yum install MariaDB-server MariaDB-client
systemctl start mysql
In order to check:
mysql -u root -p
enter password