A company asked me to develop a project to make the IT area less complicated, for both the users and the administrators. I come from a windows background, so I never had my hands on a Mac Server, only clients.
I'm having nightmares trying to make what I need to work on linux. After the countless hours reading pdfs in the osx server website I figured it would be better to look for people with actual experience on it and ask, since someone probably already did most or everything that I'm trying to do.
Here are the problems.
Users have at least 4 different logins and passwords (windows login, email, hp unix system (main software we use here is based on mumps evolution the caché database and it runs under hp/ux), and remote access throught the firewall).
Remote (vpn) access is complicated and hard to make it work.
Remote administration of computers is done using vnc.
These are some of the big list of problems this company has. So here are my questions.
1- Can I have one login for all my services (by reading the pdfs i know that windows login and email are ok, but can hp/ux authenticate with osx server)?
2- From what I saw on the website looks like its really easy to configure the spam/antivirus filter on the email server, is it really that easy?
3- If i have a mac as my firewall, how easy is to give external users access to the interal webservers, and telnet for the unix boxes (vpn)?
4- Is there any solution like microsoft's sms for osxserver, or any other good solution at all? (something like apple's remote desktop but for pc clients)
For the first phase of this project I want to start slow with one server and 50-100 users having their home folders on the server, I would like to know what kind of hardware i should get (if i need a xserver, or if a powermac can do it, or even an imac) and any tips on a backup hardware/software solution would be fine too.
I really have a lot more questions but this is a lot already
Thanks in advance for any tips and answers.
Fernando Battistella.