Exchange 5.5 for a small business

[Kirill S. Palagin]

Own e-mail domain and full SMTP connectivity.
Mail delivery will be reliable and you will get support here.
(Most frequent contributors here just hate POP3 "connectors").

Todd Paulson wrote:

> Have a small business with less than ten employees and have a small NT
> network with Office 2000. Want to get "online" with an ISP because
> our clients want to do more with E-mail. We are looking to get a
> firewall and possibly a DSL connection. Looking for a "medium cost"
> solution to be able to have all the functionality of Exchange/Outlook.
> I realize it depends on who the ISP is but from a general standpoint
> would it be better to have a POP (ISP) server or have our own domain
> name and all that goes with that???
>
> Thank you!!

[Unknown]

[Steve B]

So you are definitely putting in an exchange
server/firewall/router/DSL/Exchange licensing/administration time?

If you are going that far, register your own domain name through your
ISP. If you want, they can do all the DNS work for you and coordinate
things with you.

My setup is to have two NICs in my Exchange box, one to
router/firwall---->ISP (with a legal IP), and one private NIC
(10.0.x.x) for LAN. My ISP does all my DNS work, which isn't really
much, just some entries during setup. So they have the records setup
to point to the legal NIC on the server.

If your server is reliable and you know enough so as not to be a
dangerous admin, things will run great.

[Unknown]

Thanks for the info! I realize that this is an Exchange group but can
you elaborate on the 2 NIC setup and do you have any recommendations
for a cost/effective Firewall?

FYI, all we have is one server...Dell PowerEdge 4300 550MHz, 256 Ram,
three 9gig Raid5 (18 usable but down to 10 now). I'm thinking of
getting another 9gig and having just Exchange on that. I realize that
Exchange should have its own box but we can't afford that:( The
utilization on the server is minimal and more concerned about security
than anything!

Thanks again!!!

[Steve Basile]

Just add another NIC, you'll be able to config it's properties as you
did the first nic. You'll place the public IP (given to you by the
ISP), subnet mask, and gateway address (router) on this adapter.

Then gateway all IPs except your private set to this adapter (you
probably won't need to play with your routing table, mine setup on
it's own OK). 10.x.x.x are non-routable, so no worry about people
being able to see this a NIC with that address on the other side of
the router.

If you do not understand IP enough to get through that, then get a
book on it. I leanred it all from an MCSE study guide for TCP/IP for
NT 4 (sybex publishing).

-Steve