Sacramento computer consulting/support, network support & managed services

Please report broken links (or share new links for software that should be added to this list) to the following: moc.hcettfed@troppus

::Distros:: SMTP:: POP:: Webservers:: FTP:: Databases :: DNS:: Networking:: Proxy:: Backup:: PBX:: Security::

Linux Distros:

Fedora- The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from free software. website

Redhat (Enterprise)- Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the new Red Hat Desktop, provides the premier operating system solution for open source computing. It's sold by annual subscription, runs on seven system architectures, and is certified by top enterprise software and hardware vendors. It's backed by a Red Hat Network subscription up to 24x7 support with one-hour response, and the Red Hat Open Source Assurance program. website

Debian- The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. This operating system that we have created is called Debian GNU/Linux, or simply Debian for short. website

Mandrake- Mandrakelinux is a friendly Linux Operating System which specializes in ease-of-use for both servers and the home/office. It is freely available in many languages throughout the world. website

Suse- An easy to use commercial Linux distro. website

Knoppix- a Free and Open Source Live Linux CD. Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots and runs completely from cd. website

Gentoo- a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme performance, configurability and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience. website

Slackware- Slackware is designed with the twin goals of ease of use and stability as top priorities. Including the latest popular software while retaining a sense of tradition, providing simplicity and ease of use alongside flexibility and power, Slackware brings the best of all worlds to the table. website

Ubuntu- Ubuntu is a complete Linux-based operating system, freely available with both community and professional support. It is developed by a large community and we invite you to participate too! The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu Philosophy: that software should be available free of charge, that software tools should be usable by people in their local language and despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to customise and alter their software in whatever way they see fit. website

NetBSD- The NetBSD Project is an international collaborative effort of a large group of people, to produce a freely available and redistributable UNIX-like operating system, NetBSD. website

OpenBSD- The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. OpenBSD is developed by volunteers. website

FreeBSD- FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible, AMD64, Alpha, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development. website

Linux SMTP Mail Servers:

Sendmail- One of the most widley used Mail transfer agents. website

Qmail- qmail is a modern SMTP server which makes sendmail obsolete. website

Postfix- Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure, while at the same time being sendmail compatible enough to not upset existing users. Thus, the outside has a sendmail-ish flavor, but the inside is completely different. website

Exim- Exim is a message transfer agent (MTA) developed at the University of Cambridge for use on Unix systems connected to the Internet. It is freely available under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. In style it is similar to Smail 3, but its facilities are more general. There is a great deal of flexibility in the way mail can be routed, and there are extensive facilities for checking incoming mail. Exim can be installed in place of sendmail, although the configuration of exim is quite different to that of sendmail. website

Xmail- XMail is an Internet and intranet mail server featuring an SMTP server, POP3 server, finger server, multiple domains, no need for users to have a real system account, SMTP relay checking, RBL/RSS/ORBS/DUL and custom ( IP based and address based ) spam protection, SMTP authentication ( PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5 POP3-before-SMTP and custom ), a POP3 account syncronizer with external POP3 accounts, account aliases, domain aliases, custom mail processing, direct mail files delivery, custom mail filters, mailing lists, remote administration, custom mail exchangers, logging, and multi-platform code. XMail sources compile under GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and NT/2K/XP. website

Linux POP and IMAP Servers:

Courier- The Courier mail transfer agent (MTA) is an integrated mail/groupware server based on open commodity protocols, such as ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, LDAP, SSL, and HTTP. Courier provides ESMTP, IMAP, POP3, webmail, and mailing list services within a single, consistent, framework. Individual components can be enabled or disabled at will. Courier now implements basic web-based calendaring and scheduling services integrated in the webmail module. website

Cucipop- Cucipop is a fast and robust implementation of the RFC1939 POP3 protocol. It supports both BSD-type and SysV-type mailbox formats, works reliably over NFS.and it includes an option to defeat "leave mail on server" clients. Cucipop can run from inetd or as a standalone daemon. website

qpopper- Qpopper is the most widely-used server for the POP3 protocol (this allows users to access their mail using any POP3 client). Qpopper supports the latest standards, and includes a large number of optional features. Qpopper is normally used with standard UNIX mail transfer and delivery agents such as sendmail or smail. website

dovecot- Dovecot is an open source IMAP and POP3 server for Linux/UNIX-like systems, written with security primarily in mind. Although it's written in C, it uses several coding techniques to avoid most of the common pitfalls.Dovecot can work with standard mbox and maildir formats and it's fully compatible with UW-IMAP and Courier IMAP servers' implementation of them, as well as mail clients accessing the mailboxes directly. It's easy to migrate from them to Dovecot. Dovecot will also soon have its own high performance mailbox format called dbox. Perhaps some day in future Dovecot will also support storing mails in SQL databases. website

Linux Webservers:

Apache- The most popular and stable web server on the internet. According to Netcraft the Apache server runs on 66.99% of all web servers on the internet. (This website runs on Apache, of course!) website

Thttpd- thttpd is a simple, small, portable, fast, and secure HTTP server. website

Linux FTP Servers:

Wu-ftpd- Wuarchive-ftpd, more affectionately known as WU-FTPD, is a replacement ftp daemon for Unix systems developed at Washington University (*.wustl.edu) by Chris Myers and later by Bryan D. O'Connor (who are no longer working on it or supporting it!). WU-FTPD is the most popular ftp daemon on the Internet, used on many anonymous ftp sites all around the world. website

Proftp- ProFTPD grew out of the desire to have a secure and configurable FTP server, and out of a significant admiration of the Apache web server. website

Linux Database Servers:

Mysql- The MySQL database server is the world's most popular open source database. With more than five million active installations, MySQL has quickly become the core of many high-volume, business-critical applications. website

Postgres- The PostgreSQL Global Development Group is a community of companies and people co-operating to drive the development of PostgreSQL, the worlds most advanced Open Source database software. website

Linux DNS Servers:

Bind- The BIND DNS Server is used on the vast majority of name serving machines on the Internet, providing a robust and stable architecture on top of which an organization's naming architecture can be built. The resolver library included in the BIND distribution provides the standard APIs for translation between domain names and Internet addresses and is intended to be linked with applications requiring name service. website

Pdns- The publicly available network simulator ns has become a popular and widely used simulator for research in telecommunications networks. However, the design of ns is such that simulation of very large networks is difficult, if not impossible, due to excessive memory and CPU time requirements. The PADS research group at Georgia Tech has developed extensions and enhancements to the ns simulator to allow a network simulation to be run in a parallel and distributed fashion, on a network of workstations. website

Linux Networking and Security:

Keepalived (LVS)- The main goal of the keepalived project is to add a strong & robust keepalive facility to the Linux Virtual Server project. This project is written in C with multilayer TCP/IP stack checks. Keepalived implements a framework based on three family checks : Layer3, Layer4 & Layer5/7. This framework gives the daemon the ability of checking a LVS server pool states. When one of the server of the LVS server pool is down, keepalived informs the linux kernel via a setsockopt call to remove this server entrie from the LVS topology. In addition keepalived implements an independent VRRPv2 stack to handle director failover. So in short keepalived is a userspace daemon for LVS cluster nodes healthchecks and LVS directors failover. website

Ultramonkey (LVS)- Ultra Monkey is a project to create load balanced and highly available services on a local area network using Open Source components on the Linux Operating System. website

Super Sparrow - Super Sparrow enables users to load balance traffic between geographically separated points of presence (global load balancing) by finding the site network-wise closest to clients. This is done by accessing BGP routing information, the information that determines the path that traffic will take on the internet. Super Sparrow was developed by Hormes. Please use the Ultramonkey Mailing list for support. website

Zebra- GNU Zebra is free software that manages TCP/IP based routing protocols. It supports BGP-4 protocol as described in RFC1771 (A Border Gateway Protocol 4) as well as RIPv1, RIPv2 and OSPFv2. Unlike traditional, monolithic architectures and even the so-called "new modular architectures" that remove the burden of processing routing functions from the cpu and utilize special ASIC chips instead, Zebra software offers true modularity. (and it has a cisco like interface :-)website

quagga- Quagga is a routing software suite, providing implementations of OSPFv2, OSPFv3, RIP v1 and v2, RIPv3 and BGPv4 for Unix platforms, particularly FreeBSD and Linux and also NetBSD, to mention a few. Quagga is a fork of GNU Zebra which was developed by Kunihiro Ishiguro. The Quagga tree aims to build a more involved community around Quagga than the current centralised model of GNU Zebra. website

Xorp- XORP is the eXtensible Open Router Platform. The XORP project is developing an open source software router. The software is intended to be stable and fully featured enough for production use, and flexible and extensible enough for research use. The software is covered by a BSD-style license and the code is publicly available allowing deployment, development, and commericalization. website

Freesco- FREESCO (stands for FREE ciSCO) is a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 3 ethernet/arcnet/token_ring/arlan network cards and up to 2 modems. Freesco runs off a single floppy and as little as 6MB of RAM and has a Unique Web Control Panel. website

freeswan- IPSEC is Internet Protocol SECurity. It uses strong cryptography to provide both authentication and encryption services. Authentication ensures that packets are from the right sender and have not been altered in transit. Encryption prevents unauthorised reading of packet contents. These services allow you to build secure tunnels through untrusted networks. Everything passing through the untrusted net is encrypted by the IPSEC gateway machine and decrypted by the gateway at the other end. The result is Virtual Private Network or VPN. This is a network which is effectively private even though it includes machines at several different sites connected by the insecure Internet website

openswan- Openswan is an Open Source implementation of IPsec for the Linux operating system. Is it a code fork of the FreeS/WAN project, started by a few of the developers who were growing frustrated with the politics surrounding the FreeS/WAN project. website

OpenVPN- OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPNs, WiFi security, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls website

Linux Proxy and Caching Servers:

Squid- Squid is a high-performance proxy caching server for web clients, supporting FTP, gopher, and HTTP data objects. Unlike traditional caching software, Squid handles all requests in a single, non-blocking, I/O-driven process. website

Linux Backup Software:

Amanda- Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows hosts. website

Bacula- Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. In technical terms, it is a network client/server based backup program. Bacula is relatively easy to use and efficient, while offering many advanced storage management features that make it easy to find and recover lost or damaged files. Bacula source code has been released under the GPL version 2 license. website

tar- The tar program provides the ability to create tar archives, as well as various other kinds of manipulation. For example, you can use tar on previously created archives to extract files, to store additional files, or to update or list files which were already stored. Initially, tar archives were used to store files conveniently on magnetic tape. The name `tar' comes from this use; it stands for tape archiver. Despite the utility's name, tar can direct its output to available devices, files, or other programs (using pipes). tar may even access remote devices or files (as archives). Tar comes with pretty much every linux distro. website

FreeNAS- FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC protocols, local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 16MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key. The minimal FreeBSD distribution, Web interface, PHP scripts and documentation are based on M0n0wall. website

Backuppc- BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux and WinXX PCs and laptops to a server's disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain. website

Linux PBX (Public Branch Exchange) and VOIP (Voice Over IP):

Asterisk- Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response, Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway). Check the Features section for a more complete list.

Asterisk needs no additional hardware for Voice over IP. For interconnection with digital and analog telephony equipment, Asterisk supports a number of hardware devices, most notably all of the hardware manufactured by Asterisk's sponsors, Digium. Digium has single and quad span T1 and E1 interfaces for interconnection to PRI lines and channel banks as well as a single port FXO card and a one to four-port modular FXS card.

Also supported are the Internet Line Jack and Internet Phone Jack products from Quicknet.

Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces. Asterisk supports US and European standard signalling types used in standard business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastructure. Asterisk not only supports traditional phone equipment, it enhances them with additional capabilities.

Using the Inter-Asterisk eXchange (IAX) Voice over IP protocol, Asterisk merges voice and data traffic seamlessly across disparate networks. While using Packet Voice, it is possible to send data such as URL information and images in-line with voice traffic, allowing advanced integration of information.

Asterisk provides a central switching core, with four APIs for modular loading of telephony applications, hardware interfaces, file format handling, and codecs. It allows for transparent switching between all supported interfaces, allowing it to tie together a diverse mixture of telephony systems into a single switching network.

Asterisk is primarily developed on GNU/Linux for x/86. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux for PPC along with OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X Jaguar. Other platforms and standards based UNIX-like operating systems should be reasonably easy to port for anyone with the time and requisite skill to do so. Asterisk is available in the testing and unstable Debian archives, maintained thanks to Mark Purcell. website

Ser (Sip Express Router)- SIP Express Router (ser) is a high-performance, configurable, free SIP ( RFC3261 ) server . It can act as SIP registrar, proxy or redirect server. SER features an application-server interface, presence support, SMS gateway, SIMPLE2Jabber gateway, RADIUS/syslog accounting and authorization, server status monitoring, FCP security, etc. Web-based user provisioning, serweb, available. Its performance allows it to deal with operational burdens, such as broken network components, attacks, power-up reboots and rapidly growing user population. SER's configuration ability meets needs of a whole range of scenarios including small-office use, enterprise PBX replacements and carrier services. website

Linux network security software:

ClamAV- Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of this software is the integration with mail servers (attachment scanning). The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via Internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package, which you can use with your own software. Most importantly, the virus database is kept up to date . website

Linux Consulting and Linux Support

Linux support and Mailing Lists Provided by Deft Tech: