Linux Server how to ?

[Youkai]

Hi there,
I am in the UK as a Trainee to learn some more aboit my job as an IT Support worker ...
Now I am in a company (only 5 employes) which wants me to set up a full Linux Server WITHOUT GUI.

Problem is, I hate Linux and I have hardly ever even used the client Version so I have like no idea at all what I am supposed to do.

I am trying to search trough all Kind of Tutorials and stuff since two days but I still have no idea what I am doing -.- and I even told them still they tell me I could learn all of it reading trough the web and hope I can set up a server for them and make a good documentation.


Now I got so far that I installed Ubuntu Server and added Samba to it configured it as dc and using integrated dns, but when I try to connect a Windows machine to the domain I get the promt with the domain name where I need to put my credentials ... After doing so I get some error that my dns server is not working properly. (Maybe I need to do flushdns ? Just thought about it while typing and didn't try yet)
But I can Ping.the Server and the server can Ping.the Client after shutting off the Firewall.


Somehow I watched 4 Youtube Tutorials aboit setting up a Domain eith Samba and every of these were completely different oO
I read a lot of pages and they were different for many parts as well plus.there were lots of things that.were older than 2 years and did not work anymore or worked different


Does anybody here know a good Tutorial how you would want to setup a small business Server with Ubuntu withouth a gui ? Or could someone give me at least some hints what I should to ?
(Problem is, those ppl in the company not know what they need/want themselfes oO)

 

[FAST6191]

(Problem is, those ppl in the company not know what they need/want themselfes oO)

If memory serves you were a machinist at one point in time. You no more want to work without a spec in IT at that level than you do in your previous role.

Anyway if you have got as far as you have then you have done all the hard stuff. What I imagine is happening is samba is wonderful when you get it right but before then it is a complete nightmare (samba tends to start secure and get workable as you go on where windows lets it all be free until you tell it not to). Equally depending upon the age of the tutorials there have been several revisions of samba's config setup in recent times, and several things you think would not matter actually do.

That said if you have not flushed DNS configs and possibly pointed it at the new server if they were hardcoded somewhere then do that first.

 

[RevPokemon]

One question is why Ubuntu? Generally for servers I have seen RHEL, Debian, CentOS, Open/SUSE or some other company based distribution. I would personally suggest that if allowed use on of those distributions that is more well known for servers or perhaps go the BSD route if you wanted. Mainly due to better community support or if allowed/need commercial support.

 

[Youkai]

I changed from Metal Miller to IT Support 2 years ago
In Germany we have a different system than most other countries, my current company (town hall) offered a job as a trainee for IT and me and some other ppl wrote an application.
Somehow they took me and now I will be learning to become an IT Scientist within 3 years of training (only earning like 700 bucks a month)

Now within my second year (just went into 3rd) I was sent to the UK for training.
The first Company I have been with for 2 weeks had just one single IT guy and he told me himself that he does know even less than I do so I set up an MDT for him with completely updated Windows and some installations and he was happy like a little child in a sweets shop XD

But because I couldn't learn anything from him I asked to change company
The new Company now (5 employees and all Programmer, which is not included in my branch of IT Science as I am doing support and network stuff) wants me to set up that Linux server with Ubuntu (@RevPokemon which is based on Debian I thought ?) but there is no GUI allowed which makes it Hard for me as I have never really done anything with Linux at all except just a tiny little bit with Raspberry which used a GUI.

________________________________


Flushing DNS didn't work sadly no Idea what to do now ... the funny thing is that if I want to join the domain which I called Nameless.lan windows tells me it does not find it but if I just join Nameless it "works" up to the point that it is asking me for my credentials and after inserting them it says there is a DNS error.
Probably there is actually something wrong with my DNS but I never had so really do anything manually with the DNS Service in the Windows Server 2012/16

Here a screen from Samba Status

 

[FAST6191]

Ubuntu server is fairly well established and being debian based you have that to fall back on. Its repos and nice and it is served well by the Aptitude package manager. Given my own choice it would not be mine and I would go with the ones mentioned (well maybe not RHEL) but it is not a far out there choice. Commercial support is an option for them as well http://www.ubuntu.com/management
Again it would not be my first choice but at the same time it is not something I would drag my heels on and attempt to change, especially not for a basic small business file share/domain controller/intranet/dns type thing.
Also OP I hope you are doing this as a virtual machine.

 

[Youkai]

Ubuntu server is fairly well established and being debian based you have that to fall back on. Its repos and nice and it is served well by the Aptitude package manager. Given my own choice it would not be mine and I would go with the ones mentioned (well maybe not RHEL) but it is not a far out there choice. Commercial support is an option for them as well http://www.ubuntu.com/management
Again it would not be my first choice but at the same time it is not something I would drag my heels on and attempt to change, especially not for a basic small business file share/domain controller/intranet/dns type thing.
Also OP I hope you are doing this as a virtual machine.

yeah I am doing it in a Virtual machine, BUT for testing if I can connect I had to remove that marker from "DHCP Guard"
I would haver preffered to use VM Ware or Virtual Box but they have Hyper-V installed and want me to use this -_-

P.S. added a screenshot

 

[jurassicplayer]

You said server, but you haven't even said what kind yet. Media, mail, web, file, sound, print, etc. Anyways, once you know what server you want, go to the archwiki on the topic.

 

[Youkai]

Well domain controller with everything you might need ....
they don't know themselfes exactly what they want

 

[jurassicplayer]

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Samba/Active_Directory_domain_controller
Read it and get a gist for what you need and what options you might need. Also make sure this is the right thing (because this might be completely off, I'm not IT). Then once you get an idea of what it is and if this is what you are looking for, you can pretty much use the info to deal with the installation on most other distros.

 

[nIxx]

Somehow makes me wonder what you learn as "Network guy" if you don't use Linux. Anyway since Linux and the tools for it have such great documentations why not use them
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setup_a_Samba_Active_Directory_Domain_Controller

 

[Youkai]

Somehow makes me wonder what you learn as "Network guy" if you don't use Linux. Anyway since Linux and the tools for it have such great documentations why not use them
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setup_a_Samba_Active_Directory_Domain_Controller

You know there is something called Windows which by far more than 50% of the companies use right ?
If I would judge from the other trainees in my IT class there is not a single one using Linux ... its mostly those hardcore freaks who know it all better using Linux at home ...

Munich had that Project about changing everything from Windows to Linux and they wasted several millions of Euros and are rather unhappy with it.
I doubt that there are a lot big companies using Linux, especially as Windows is getting better as well and implementing lots of stuff from Linux to make all those fanboys happy.

And about networking its basically Cisco ...


You know why you can earn so much more money if you are Linux professional ? its because noone wants to do this stuff XD


I have that same page up as well but still not everything working as they describe it or there might be some missunderstandings (probably)
Its just the same as Chinese for me ;(
And as I said, you look up for 10 Tutorials to set up a DC and you get 10 different ways of doing it oO

 

[nIxx]

You know there is something called Windows which by far more than 50% of the companies use right ?

Yeah i know that as Desktop enviroment almost everybody likes his Windows Desktop but as Server Enviroment almost always Linux is used btw. it's really the better choice imo. Didn't want to argue about that but i was just wondering why they don't teach Linux

I would even like to help more but it's been a while since i did need to setup Samba and back in the days i think it was different btw. even more complicated.

 

[Youkai]

Well even our server all run with Microsoft and many other companies use Microsoft server too ...
I think we only have 2 Linux server and 16 Windows ones and those 2 Linux server are just still there because noone knows what they are doing XD
some former employee who was a Linux freak set em up and now that he is gone there is noone who has an idea about Linux in our place anymore.

I can't speak for all/most companies but those that I know use mostly Windows Server.

Man I really have no idea what I am doing ... just deleted and reinstalled the server on the VM and now I get no internet connection because I set a static address ... changing it back do dhcp fails ...
this sucks so bad -.-V
---
damn that fragndosngn network was probably disabled in hyper-v -.-V

 

[FAST6191]

As a web server, possibly as an all Linux domain, as a database server (give or take what I might think about BSD and some of the other unix flavours) and arguably as an email server (exchange is a pig but it certainly works once you get running). That said domain controller, active directory and some of the database stuff along with exchange means I can see being a sole Windows sysadmin/network administrator without so much as a cursory understanding of Linux, or using https://xkcd.com/627/ if you get it thrust upon you. Training up now for a future career as a Windows only admin I would say it is a risky path from where I sit as Microsoft seems to be doing its best to leave the small-medium enterprise market, and the token "use the cloud" stuff they are trying to punt in its place does not cut it for many. Guess this might be one of those computing training has not kept with the times things.

On networking being only Cisco then I would very much encourage having a look at Juniper which also do high end gear, and often using terms that are more like what people that know networking use compared to Cisco's crazy naming concepts. Equally you can do a lot with an unmanaged switch these days and some of the consumer/prosumer gear is almost suitable for use in a less computing intensive enterprise environment these days (local applications, basic file shares, domain logins and internet/email sort of thing).

 

[Joom]

Any self respecting company should never use Windows Server. There's entirely too much overhead and security concerns. Even Microsoft uses Linux on their servers. Also, why are they having you set this up in a VM? If it's just five people all using the same server, I don't see the point.

 

[FAST6191]

All servers at all levels are pretty much on VMs these days unless there is a serious reason not to (and virtual machines can even talk well to graphics cards these days so the servers what also do calculations are not immune).
Redundancy, scalability, ease of backup, ease of restore in the case of hardware failure, possibly licensing issues (tried buying a dual core server processor lately?), ease of management, ease of rollback, security (I don't need 6 services on a box so no worries about having a FTP or pbx or [you can think of as many services as I can] security issue compromise my domain controller or something) and the list goes on.
I don't think I would fire someone in a 5 person company not using a VM for a new build. I would not look favourably upon them though. 10 person would be gone for incompetence.

As for Windows server I would say it still has its place.

 

[RevPokemon]

As for Windows server I would say it still has its place.

Only issue is how much? Nowadays it seems more and more companies are wanting some one with knowledge in Linux (of various forms but SUSE or RHEL is common and so are other types like CentOS) or Propreitary Unix (of various forms). Granted Windows server is still a large heap of the servers (I think Linux, Unix, and Windows are all at a 3rd) but in my area the market just is not being favorable to it somewhat like what has happened to BSD.

 

[FAST6191]

I did question the merits of being just a Windows guy in server world in later posts, and especially with the way MS seems to be going (technet being kneecapped, small business server stuff being all but completely crippled if it still exists and big boy prices shooting up).

Using Microsoft server stuff is not like foisting lotus notes or microsoft works on your company. If you just want a domain controller and active directory thing, possibly delivered to your door, then server is a viable option rather than something no self respecting company could want.

 

[RevPokemon]

Using Microsoft server stuff is not like foisting lotus notes or Microsoft works on your company. If you just want a domain controller and active directory thing, possibly delivered to your door, then server is a viable option rather than something no self respecting company could want.

Absolutely it does have its purposes and is far from obsolete. The only issue is that where I live (although in the UK it could be different) companies either want Unix or Linux when it comes to hiring for system admins. Almost no one uses Windows servers in the tech jobs in my area (plus from what I have seen its usage is going down to an extent), although knowledge of it is still valuable for certain companies that use it for one reason or the other. Its just still I would recommend a Linux distro if some random person wanted to get into system administration.

 

[Youkai]

Well I just installed Zentyal now even though they told me to set it up without a GUI I am just not able to learn all this stuff within 2 weeks ... Its like trying to learn chinese within 2 weeks ...

So now I might look into disabling the GUI that everything seems to work as I could still administrate the whole thing trough the webpage from another Computer ^^

And I need to find out a proper way to use DNS, they said they are setting up their current DNS so that everyone can easily access the pages they are programming (its a company programming pages ..) so that they just have to type like http://Youkai or something like that instead of typing like http://10.20.0.54/home/user/homepage/index.htm or stuff like that ... somehow this does not seem to work that well with Zentyal as I can only do a link to the computers name like if the computer is named web i can go to http://web and get the apache homepage opened ...