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Linux enterprise networking solution for Pan Arab Research Centre (PARC), Dubai

Client : Pan Arab Research Centre(PARC)
Activities : Media research, Polls and surveys, Commissioned research
No of users : 90 in main office and 25 in the branch offices
Active domains : www.arabresearch.com www.arabiandemographics.com www.parc.ae
Internet gateway : ADSL from Etisalat
Client OS : Predominantly windows 98 & ME with a less than 5 XP machines.

Contacts

Contact person : Neeraj Chabra
Designation : Software support manager
Contact information : 050 5593946 (mob), 04 3376696 (off)
URL : www.arabresearch.com

The Solution

The requirement was to provide file, print and email services. Majority of the users are based in the Dubai Head office with approximately 25 users based outside. The existing solution was proving to be quite unstable and caused a lot of downtime and lost opportunities.

So the management contracted NGIT to design and implement a stable and secure solution to address the requirements of the company.

We made a detailed study of the existing network and proposed a solution based on RHEL ES 3.0 to be implemented on the existing hardware. The main problems that were observed were

Unstable system causing disruption to the network.
Lack of in-house resources to trouble shoot and maintain the aging system
Very high volume of spam mails
Ineffective gateway virus filter
Complicated mail routing schema

The proposed solution was based entirely on Opensource components to achieve the lowest TCO. We decided to base it on a popular enterprise server for stability and security. The system also had to be very stable with minimal administration requirements as the company did not have a high level of Linux expertise inhouse.

The configuration of the mail server was challenging as the server had to relay some of the mails to the external hosting server and maintain the others locally. This was done using the transport map feature of Postfix.

Due to the catchall account the hosting server was accepting a large quantity of spam mails and wasting precious bandwidth as the server had to download all of them. The spam problem was reduced by using alias accounts to accept only the required mails and rejecting the others at source.

Platform

Hardware : Dual Xeon, 2 GB RAM, Locally assembled server.

Operating system : RHEL ES 3.0

Services

File server - Samba based PDC. All the client machines log into the Samba server and have drives mapped to them. User and group based access controls. There are multiple data disks holding one or more shared directories.

Email server – Postfix based mail server. Postfix MTA. Mails are downloaded by fetchmail from a catchall account and distributed locally. All the mails are content scanned with amavisd-new. ClamAV is does the virus filtering and Spamassassin does Spam filtering. POP and IMAP is provided by Dovecoat and Squirrelmail provides a lightweight web client.

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Contact Us
Dubai
Office M-12, Bu Haleeba Gold Building, Abu Hail, Deira
P.O.Box : 88174, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Tel.: +971 4 2653202, Fax.: +971 4 2653203, Send Email

Kochi
NetworkGulf IT India
29/1132 A, Major Road, Vyttila, Kochi - 682 019
Kerala, India

Tel.: +91 484 4041254, Send Email

Voices

Network Gulf has done an excellent job by recommending and implementing the CRM system for our office. It has greatly improved our co-ordination and enables us to better manage our customer facing activities.

We had absolutely no disruption to our work and our staff had not difficulty in learning to use it. I am able to sit in my office and get a real time snapshot of all things happening around the company, thanks to Network Gulf.