Tools of the Trade

As a small business, we do not always have the luxury or resources of purchasing and using licensed software. That's not to say we don't license what we do use, but that we utilize a good amount of open-source software in our business to minimize expense.

We are a technology company, so we have several people, including myself, who can administer most of the open-source products and tools we use. This article describes some of the tools we use and how we make them work for us.

Red Hat Linux - runs our main web/mail/file server
CentOS Linux - runs the remainder of our servers
qmail - smtp/pop3 email
Courier-IMAP - IMAP server
ClamAV - antivirus
SquirelMail - webmail front-end
Apache - web server
Bugzilla - issue tracking
MySQL - database backend
Samba - file/print sharing
VMware Server - connecting to our clients with virtual machines
ISC BIND - internal dns
Open Office - for some of our servers and client desktops

Tomorrow I will go into detail into the usage of some of these products.