SME Server
SME Server, which is what E-Smith server turned into, is my favourite server OS. This Linux based distribution was originally supported by Mitel, but now Contribs.org are looking after things.
This is a complete server with file, database, printer, email and web serving all included. It can act as an internet gateway and DHCP server too if required, although I haven’t used it that way. It needs to be installed on a computer all by itself — no sharing with Windows here.
It ran very well on an HP tc2100 Pentium III 1000MHz with 128MB of RAM for over three years. I built and administered the server for the Brisbane office of a company I worked for and SME Server did everything we needed, and saved a heap of money. The HP rep that sold me the server was sceptical that it would work with such a ‘small’ amount of RAM, but I’d prototyped it on a Pentium (not even MMX) 166MHz machine with 64MB of RAM and it worked OK. Anything was better than the old DEC pentium, but the old box was later pressed into service as an external web server (since having the main file server and external webserver on the same box is silly). We joked that if the machine was hacked the hackers would think something was broken because it was so slow 
The installer for the entire OS is around 350MB and installs in under 15 minutes. It just works!
The latest version of SME Server is based on CentOS, which is an open source equivalent of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (not that they mention it on their site though). There is a pretty good pedigree here! The beauty of SME Server is the management tools that are built in. Once the server is set up, all administration takes place through a web interface.
Shared drives are called ‘Information Bays’ and these can be websites, FTP directories or SMB shares. Each user in the system gets their own private drive too, which is good in a business. Groups can be defined, with users belonging to multiple groups. This really allows for information to be restricted to the people that need to have it, such as Engineering, Accounting, HR etc. Printer serving is nice, and lets parallel port and USB printers be shared on the network without having to buy a network printer server. The local email server is helpful for staff to quickly send documents or queries to each other as the email doesn’t leave the LAN. You can use it as an external mail handler if desired, but any halfway decent or better email client (Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird for example) will handle multiple mail hosts if you have to use a ‘head office’ server.
If you are looking after a lot of computers SME Server can act as a Windows Domain Controller. This allows staff to have a single account on any networked computer, and trust me, this saves a lot of time and effort setting things up. There is plenty of support on the net, but if your demands are simple what is included on the CD will do you fine. If you like to tinker, then you can really make the server sophisticated.
If you have an old PC floating around home, I suggest downloading SME Server. I’m using SME Server 8 Beta 3 on my home server and it is running very nicely. If you were running a business, perhaps the stable release 7.4 would improve job security.
