Web Servers

We build stable, secure and reliable web servers based on the open-source Apache web server software.

From the Apache web site: "Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet since April of 1996. The July 2003 Netcraft Web Server Survey found that 63% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache, thus making it more widely used than all other web servers combined."

We host our site using Apache on FreeBSD, and can custom build a web server for your business using Apache on a server running Linux or FreeBSD. If you would like to host your web site on your own network this may be the safe, secure, stable, and inexpensive option for you.

Content Management

Let us put you in control of your web site's look, feel and content. We will install and configure an open-standards-based content management system that will put you in control of your website, its look and feel, and its content - all from your web browser

Content Management Systems (CMS).
We work with and currently support:

Drupal - Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system. Equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability, Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven sites.

Email Servers

We use qmail in all of our email server solutions. qmail has proven to be a very robust, stable, and secure solution for our email needs as well as the needs of our clients.

If you choose to have us build you your own email server, all of our email server builds include the option to access your email accounts via POP3 or IMAP clients or via a webmail interface. Managing your company's email accounts is also quick and easy with our web-based email administration interface. From this interface you may add or delete email boxes, change user passwords, and manage forwards, vacation notices, mailing lists and auto-responders.

Anti-Virus/Anti-Spam

We can also integrate SPAM tagging into your site-wide email solution to help reduce the time wasted dealing with annoying unsolicited commercial email - commonly referred to as "spam". SpamAssassin will flag spam emails in several different ways to indicate that they are very probably spam. Your email client may then be configured to move these tagged messages to an appropriately named "spam" folder where you may quickly look them over and bulk delete them, thereby significantly reducing the amount of time wasted dealing with spam. Once you are confident with SpamAssassin's capabilities you may even wish to configure your email client to immediately delete certain emails that SpamAssAssin marks as most definitely spam. More time saved!

File Servers

Our files servers are generally faster, more stable, and more reliable and less expensive than the Windows NT, or Windows 2000/2003 solutions. We start with a Linux or FreeBSD operating system and add the open-source implementation of the Windows file-sharing protocol - SAMBA. With Samba, you are not charged according to the number of clients that you connect to your file server. Connect as many clients as you like with no client licensing fees.

Samba has been proven time and time again to be a better "windows file server" than a "real" Microsoft Windows file server. A recent study by IT Weeks reports that "Samba 3 runs rings around Windows Server 2003 in file serving performance."

FAX Servers

HylaFAX is an enterprise-class system for sending and receiving facsimiles as well as for sending alpha-numeric pages.

The software is designed around a client-server architecture. Fax modems may reside on a single machine on a network and clients can submit an outbound job from any other machine on the network. Client software is designed to be lightweight and easy to port.

HylaFAX is designed to be very robust and reliable. The fax server is designed to guard against unexpected failures in the software, in the configuration, in the hardware and in general use. HylaFAX can support multiple modems and a heavy traffic load.

Some of our clients receive more than 2,000 FAXes per month using Hylafax!

Core Network Services

(Internet connectivity, CSU/DSU, router, switch installation configuration)

Wireless Networking

From the smallest, single access point wireless networks to complex, large campus or corporate wireless infrastructures with 802.1x and RADIUS requirements, we can help. Our wireless solutions are in place at several private boarding schools, restaurants, and hotels in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut. Ask us how we can provide your business with a stable, secure wireless networking solution.

Terminal Server

LTSP - "The Linux Terminal Server Project". This project's goal is to allow an administrator to set up one server to serve many diskless workstaions. The workstations don't need to be very powerful since they will boot off the network, and will generally be running only a Linux kernel, and an X server. The bulk of the applications are run on the server, reducing the need for expensive workstations. In fact many old, slow machines have been resurrected and made useful once again by this project.

DNS

djbdns - A small, fast and very secure dns server daemon replacement for the problematic BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Daemon). See the "software guarantee" on Dan Bernstein's site.

System Monitoring

XyMon - Know the status of your network, servers and all services instantly! XyMon is an open-source, distributed client-server based systems monitoring tool. It allows you to see and track systems and services via a user-friendly web-interface.

MRTG - MRTG monitors and graphs your network traffic. The Multi Router Traffic Grapher polls your network routers and switches via SNMP and gathers information regarding packets sent and received. The data is then graphed and presented to you on HTML pages. MRTG is capable of monitoring and graphing much more than switches and routers, and can be used to monitor just about anything including disk space, system load, temperature etc by using external scripts.

Snort - Intrusion Detection System. From the Snort website: Snort is an open source network intrusion detection system, capable of performing real-time traffic analysis and packet logging on IP networks. It can perform protocol analysis, content searching/matching and can be used to detect a variety of attacks and probes, such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, OS fingerprinting attempts, and much more.

Awstats - An advanced web log analyzer and statistics utility that generates easy to read, informative, graphical representation of site hits, visits, bandwidth and more! We provide this service to our Business and Enterprise level clients for free.

Firewall Systems

FreeBSD-based firewall solutions complete with site-to-site IPsec VPN support, PPTP VPN support, traffic shaping, captive portal and more.

Custom Linux IP tables firewall - Not looking for a web-based user-manageable firewall solution with all the gui bells and whistles? Let us configure and install a full-featured, custom built Linux Firewall system.

Database Servers

PostgreSQL and MySQL are two well-known, open-source databases. When you do not need the high costs of purchasing and the recurring costs licensing you would incur when purchasing a closed-source database from Microsoft, or Oracle, these two fully capable databases may fit the bill.

In an recent article posted regarding open source databases, the following was stated: "Concerns over stability, expense and how well a database plays with others are leading a quickly growing number of developer's companies to seriously consider and implement an open source database solution, we expect this trend to continue as the open source offerings are continually improved upon," said Joe McKendrick, Evans Data's database analyst.

Instant Messaging

Jabber - Jabber is an open-source, open-standard, extensible Instant Messaging service similar to legacy IM services such as Yahoo!, MSN, and AIM, but this is far from all it can do. Click the Jabber link to see a more complete overview of this technology.

Recently, ZDNet published a story showing that the number of Jabber IM users had surpassed the number of ICQ IM users.

*NOTE* Google's google talk, and Apple's IM server are both based on the open-source, open-standard jabber protocol.

Web Caching and Web Content Filtering

Squid Proxy Cache - An open-source, 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. Squid is highly configurable, and is very stable under heavy loads.

Dan's Guardian - An award winning Open Source web content filter which currently runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Mac OS X, HP-UX, and Solaris. It filters the actual content of pages based on many methods including phrase matching, PICS filtering and URL filtering. It does not purely filter based on a banned list of sites like lesser totally commercial filters.

DansGuardian is designed to be completely flexible and allows you to tailor the filtering to your exact needs. It can be as draconian or as unobstructive as you want. The default settings are geared towards what a primay school might want but DansGuardian puts you in control of what you want to block.

Squid Guard - A combined filter, redirector and access controller plugin for Squid. When integrated with Squid web proxy cache and Dan's Guardian, SquidGuard adds an additional level of capability and configurability to your web-caching proxy server solution.