• 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.

• 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.

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.