CentOS - Jun 2008 - recommendations/suggestions - geographically spread network based on Centos

Good day all,

I was wondering if I could pick some admin heads here as I have a HUGE  
project I have been tasked with.....

I am asking here since I will be basing everything on Centos, and want  
it to all play nice together. If anyone feels this is straying off  
topic, please just reply off list. I do not want to be the cause of  
one of those threads.

I have 3 offices, 1 in Canada, 2 in Mexico. We are currently  
investigating connectivity options (still no results yet), but I  
suspect one of the mexican sites will be very limited.

I need to setup the typical office setup, but need to get the  
following figured out. I personally do not have experience in this  
type of network (all my past experience comes from a centralized  
office, one location, or a multi office with services all based in  
their respective locations).

So because The connectivity is probably limited (in our mexican  
offices), I will need to take that into consideration (obviously).
Our head office has a 10mb full duplex fiber feed, but we also have  
equipment in data centers.

What I need in the end is:

- exchange like functions IE Global address book, shared calenders,  
etc (looking at scalix, or could keep my existing email server - very  
happy with it, and just setup a LDAP server and a CalDAV server -  
still investigating this one though).
- Funambol with various connectors to push email and calendars to  
blackberries and iphones.
- vpn (openvpn) - mostly just the head office though
- collaborative / project management environment (looking at alfresco  
- sharepoint alternative)
- monitoring (nagios)
- helpdesk (glpi with ocs for inventory management)
- file sharing (samba)
- remote file backups (probably just rsync into a dedicated backup  
machine in a data center)
- access to all services (probably - still waiting back from the  
higher ups) from all locations

So my first thought is that my preference it to keep as much at a data  
center as possible due to security, temperature control, connection  
reliability, etc. Due to my inexperience with some of these products,  
(IE Scalix,etc) I am kind of wondering what the best way or topology  
is to do this is.

So at a brief first thought I kind of envisioned this:

- scalix,  Funambol, alfresco, nagios (also one in my office as  
backup), backup box collocated in the data center providing it can be  
locked down adequately, and still provide the needed services to all 3  
offices.
- in each office a samba file server, vpn server.

Due to the probable connectivity issue with the remote offices (one is  
literally in the desert at a work site), I did not think a constant  
inter-office VPN was the way to go, Or even securing the main data  
center services with VPN (unless I could build it right for speed).

However I guess I could lock down the data center services with VPN,  
and create a constant connection between head office and the data  
center, and allow the other offices to connect via individual vpn  
connections as needed.

Thoughts? Just looking for a general broad overview, or some software  
recommendations if anyone from experience has a recommendation that is  
possibly better than the software I had outlined here.

Dnk



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On Sat, 2008-05-31 at 22:47 -0700, dnk wrote:
<snip>
> I have 3 offices, 1 in Canada, 2 in Mexico. We are currently
> investigating connectivity options (still no results yet), but I
> suspect one of the Mexican sites will be very limited.
Depending upon which cities in Mexico your offices are in, you may be pleasantly
surprised.
Probably the connectivity will not be as fast as in the USA, but if they
are in large cities, they will probably have very good connections
available to them, at a price. From here, we get to the USA via
satellite or undersea cable, which is very limiting. From there, it
should be much faster. Tel Mex is a company you should be contacting,
among others. They have lots of $ and should be able to provide whatever
you need.

GL, Lanny in Colombia, South America