Need some advice...

[Svenborg]

Hello...I am new to this site and new to Zentyal...so I have a couple of questions I would like to ask you gurus.

 I am wanting to replace an aging Linksys RV042 router that is running a 10mbps duplex fibre internet connection (static IP's) with Zentyal. The fibre from the ISP is routed by a Juniper networks SRX210 and is not configurable from my end...only by the ISP. I was given static IP's to put into my router (RV042) to connect to the Juniper. It was suggested by the ISP to drop my router and go with a firewall appliance with UTM...but their cost was to me was a deal breaker. I then searched around to find more cost friendly appliances and I found some....but I still did not think the costs were inline with my tastes. Then I found Zentyal....

The router (RV042) is currently handling DHCP and all port forwarding for my network. Behind that router I have a 16 port gigabit switch and connected to that 1-24 port 10/100 and 1-48 port 10/100 switchs. Two servers connected to the gig switch...one linux (Ubuntu 10.10), one Windows (XP-soon to replaced with Win7), 3 wireless AP's, one NAS storage, one FTP site (Filezilla-on Windows server) and one Access Anywhere thin client VPN device. Now what I want to do is to be able to use Zentyal as the gateway and as an UTM device (not in 3.0??) as this seems to be a value added product. I currently have about 40 employees (Windows based-non domain network) that access the network and internet through the RV042 and I really believe that it is "choking" the network at times....and at best really only provides basic network protection.

I am currently building a test server with an AMD X2 250 3.0ghz cpu, 4 gig DDR2 ram, 2 dlink gigabit nics, 1-sata2 160gb hd on a gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H motherboard. This hardware comes from my parts bin here at work. I also have a triple core cpu available and could bump the ram to 8gb.

Questions would be....is this a reasonable goal to accomplish...i.e will it improve my routing performance and up my seccurity and is this kind of hardware capable of handling what I want to accomplish with the amount of users I have currently.

Moving forward from this I would also like to experiment with the Office/Zarafa setup...but most likey on a separate piece of hardware. Could the office setup be run on similar hardware?? or would it be wise to move to something more robust.

Thanks....

[christian]

Although "UTM" is fuzzy (I mean this doesn't describe any scope and features for what I understand), I would say that Zentyal can nicely fit your expectations, at least as internet gateway.
I would be less prone to promote it as Office/Zarafa "using dedicated hardware". Reason is that Zentyal is primarily designed to run on one single box. You can obviously install another occurrence running Office/Zarafa "only" but this will have some drawbacks:
- need to handle port forwarding on Zentyal "gateway" so that mail related flows are routed to your "Zarafa" box
- Same for HTTP and FTP that are part of the "Office" package (I really wonder why)
- need to maintain at least 2 DNS servers (no synchronization) and DNS is mandatory because of Samba 4

Thus the easiest way is to install everything on one single server, so far.

[Svenborg]

Thanks for the response. The "UTM" I spoke of was unified threat management...I am really wanting to secure our network as much as possible without blowing up the piggy bank...

[christian]

I understand what UTM means but, as I said, such acronym doesn't describe accurately features and settings.