hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0942.txt

Episode: 942
Title: HPR0942: Zentyal Linux Small Business Server
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0942/hpr0942.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:16:13

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Hey everybody, it's Riddlebox again, and today I'm going to talk to you about Zenchial
Linux Small Business Server.
You can find this at www.zenchial.org that's Z-E-N-T-Y-A-L, Zenchial.org.
Little bit of history, a couple years ago, like three or four years ago, I came into work
one day.
You have a Windows 2003 Small Business Server running as our Domain Controller and DNS
Server and everything for the company that I had set up a long time ago.
The company wanted to have a Windows Server for some reason.
They wouldn't let me put a Linux Server in there, and this Domain Controller ran for
quite a while.
I came in one day, and two of our other technicians said that the server crashed, and they were
trying to reinstall Windows 2003 Small Business Server, get it working, and they were having
so many problems.
My boss was freaking out because nobody could log into our ticketing software, and he had
heard me constantly talk about Linux and the things I could do with Linux.
He actually went online and found a new Ubuntu disk, found how to set up a Domain Controller
in Linux.
When I got there, he was having problems getting things to work, and he asked if I could
just do it, and I said, well, you know, I'm under a time crunch and I've never done it,
so I might take a bit, and he gave me the go ahead to do whatever I had to do.
I started searching online for an easy way to set up a Domain Controller for a small
network.
We have maybe 12 to 15 PCs, and I came upon E-Box, and it was basically Ubuntu with
the web management that allowed you to set up a Domain and all kinds of other stuff.
I installed it, looked at a little how-to on it, you know, walked through on what to
do, and within 20 minutes after I had downloaded the ISO, and burned the disk, I had our network
back up, and my boss was a convert from then on.
We had no problems with it, and that thing came packed with all kinds of modules that
you could use to do things with your network.
It even packed the Astra server in it and all kinds of stuff, but we just used the Domain
Controller.
Fast forward to now, I came in, and our company was purchased by one of our technicians,
and he is now buying newer PCs for accounting and stuff which have Windows 7 on him, and
the E-Box server, you couldn't register a Windows 7 computer to E-Box, so we looked
up E-Box to see if there was an upgrade, and I found out that E-Box became Zenchial,
and I downloaded it, and I will first talk about, you know, the Zenchial server and everything.
From the website, it says that basically Zenchial is a small, a Linux small business server.
You can manage all of your computer network services through one single platform.
Zenchial is a network gateway, unified threat manager, office server, infrastructure manager,
unified communication server, or a combination of them.
All services based on the same technology and fully integrated for the first time you
can make your network act as one single unit, and it's the Linux small business server.
This thing, you install it, and they have a walkthrough, and you can pick, you can pick
as a gateway, you know, to just set the server to be a gateway for you.
You can set it up to be a UTM so that it's protecting your network against external attacks
and trussions or security threats.
It can offer secure access to corporate network, VPNs.
I believe it does PPP, and maybe IPsec.
I can't quite remember that.
We're not using that.
We're using a Sonic wall for that.
You can set up your infrastructure with it, you know, your local network, your optimize,
you can optimize internal traffic, you can manage your domain from it, you can have
internal website on there, or you can manage your network users and groups, share office
resources from printers, files, calendars, contacts, and tasks, and you can back up a lot
of data.
Each user gets a shared drive automatically created for them on the server.
So it's mapped directly to it.
You can set the size limit of that map drive, so if users have data that they would like
to save off of their PC or copy it to the server, you can just drop it in there.
We set ours to be fairly low.
Each user gets 500 megabytes.
The default is 100 megabytes, so I guess we actually bump it up.
That way users can back it up to the server and stuff, and then we back up the server to
an external drive.
Everything is backed up.
Zentiel has unified communications.
It does have a jabber server in it, so you can chat and talk through that and everything.
I think my boss wants to look into that because our phone system that we use the upgrade
we can actually incorporate jabber servers into it, and then incorporate chat features
and stuff, which, you know, it'll be fun to do.
All in all, vizentiel.com website, it really walks you through everything.
I mean, there's so much you can do with this thing.
I found some how-tos on setting it up.
There is a YouTube video that it is linked to on the site.
If you go there, I have to look at it.
I've got the site open right now.
I'm clicking through all the stuff right now to see if I can find...
Okay.
It's if you just go to zentiel.org, and then there's a featured screencast on the top right
there that links to a YouTube video.
It walks, you know, everything through there.
The installation guide is underneath the big blue button to download.
What I really like about this thing is you create an account on zentiel's website when
you install the system and get it up and running.
What that does is that links the account to the server, and you can manage multiple servers
from there.
But as soon as it comes online, you put in an email address and everything, and that
backs up to that account for free.
You don't have to pay.
So your configs and stuff are all backed up.
I don't know if any data or anything gets backed up.
I wouldn't imagine because they do have a pay service, and I would think that they would
want you to pay for that service.
But I know the configs are backed up.
What it tells you, you know, every so often it will email you and say, hey, we just backed
up your server, you know, or one night our power went out at the office, and we lost,
you know, everything went down, of course.
And I got an email at my home that night on my phone telling me that the zentiel web portal
had lost connection to our domain controller.
So you know, within minutes, I knew that, you know, the server was down and everything
and I knew that I was going to have a lot of work to do in the morning to get everybody
going again.
But I have been really impressed with everything.
I mean, it's just a great system.
We can get it up and running really fast and, you know, you can pick what parts of it you
want to run and stuff.
So my boss is really a convert and actually, you know, I work, it's for a phone company
that we install phone systems and he wants to get into more networking stuff and I believe
zentiel is going to be the domain controller that we sell to customers if they want one
or need one.
So I'm really, really happy and, you know, they have a forum, they've got everything
documentation on their website and stuff.
It's a really, really nice system.
So I really recommend to you guys if you have to set up a domain controller and you just
want something that's easy and fast.
Look at zentiel, all the benefits you get from it are great.
So that is going to be it for today.
So I'd like to thank you for listening.
And if you have anything, any comments or questions, I can be reached at james dot mid
indoor at gmail.com and that's james dot m-i-d-d-e-n-d-o-r-f-f at gmail.com.
And again, everybody, please record something for HPR.
Hacker Public Radio is a great service and, you know, we could all benefit from things
that you guys find and, you know, want to talk about.
So thank you and we'll talk to you soon.
Thanks.
Bye.
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