Timothy Parker Consulting Incorporated

e-smith Server and Gateway

While plumbing the depths of the Ethernet world in the last few columns, I’ve had mail about the Cobalt Networks products I looked at in the previous series than in any other series I’ve written.  Dozens of people have e-mailed and a half dozen questioned me at Comdex Canada (what, you missed my appearance?  Videos are available!) about alternatives to Cobalt’s products.  Not that there’s anything wrong at all with the Cobalt products, just that most people want some alternatives.  So it’s time for a short revisit to the subject of Web servers, gateways, and firewalls.  This time, we’ll look at a few non-Cobalt products as alternatives.

I’ll start with the e-smith server and gateway (all lower case, as is the trend) from e-smith inc, an Ottawa-based software company.  The e-smith server and gateway is a Linux-based gateway product designed to provide small to medium sized businesses with a cost-effective open-source based firewall, Web server and gateway rolled into one.  Since the e-smith server and gateway is software, you’ll need to provide the hardware and peripherals such as network cards, and configure them yourself if the e-smith software cannot do it for you. A list of supported cards and controllers is available from the company’s Web site (www.e-smith.net) and in the documentation that accompanies the product. The company advises that whatever machine you install the software on will be totally dedicated as a gateway (the hard drive gets reformatted as part of the installation procedure).  You could use it for other purposes such as an application server, but unless you’re configuring a lightly-used network, you should leave the machine dedicated to its purpose.

The CD-ROM that e-smith server and gateway arrives on includes a copy of Linux that has been tweaked to perform properly in the gateway role.  Installing the system is simple: boot from the supplied floppy and insert the CD-ROM when prompted.  Let the system go through its steps, responding to the prompts as necessary. Installation on my test machine took a half hour, but final configuration of the gateway software requires a bit of experimentation (and rebooting after each change).  The load the e-smith software imposes on the hardware is light.  A small network of 50 users or so could easily be handled by a slow Pentium II machine such as the P133 I tested on originally.  To load the software, I also installed on a dual-processor 750MHz PIII systems (the software did not recognize or use the second processor) and found I could handle loads of well over 250 simultaneous light-traffic users on the network.  You can use the e-smith server and gateway with any ISP connection acting as the gateway between your network and the ISP (and hence the Internet), or leave it off the Internet and use it as a server on the network itself, managing traffic and internal Web pages.

As I mentioned, configuring the e-smith server and gateway properly took me a while.  In fact, I played with parameters for a couple of days before I was satisfied with the setup.  The difference in performance between the original setup and my final setup was quite small, though, and most people will not bother playing with the configuration options. Being an inveterate tweaker had me doing things with configuration options that most administrators wouldn’t want to try, but that’s why I get paid the big bucks – all in the name of research for you, our valued reader. (There! That justifies all the time I wasted tweaking!)

The documentation supplied with the product is very good at guiding you through the installation and setup of the gateway package.  There are lots of illustrations and tips in the sixty-page spiral bound manual, and although it may sound short in length, the documentation does a great job. A little system administration knowledge is assumed in that you should know what a lot of networking terms (such as DHCP and LDAP) mean but you don’t need experience with Linux to install and configure the product.  After the original configuration is finalized with the character-based menu-driven interface, you can employ the HTTP interface from any machine on the network to manage the e-smith server and gateway.

There are a lot of capabilities built into the e-smith product. There’s a POP mail server, a web server, and a useful concept called “information bays” or ibays. Ibays are a mechanism for developing user groups with shared access permissions.  Each ibay can be password protected and used for a specific task, such as a project or shared application.  Or you can use ibays in much the same way groups are used in UNIX.  Access to ibay information is through a Web browser, making it a friendly access method for novice users.

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Last modified: January 23, 2007