Linux started as a project by an enthusiastic student Linus Torvald , as an avenue of  developing an open source system, which would be distinguished for its power and flexibility. It has since evolved into a mature system that is secure, reliable and stable. Linux has since been accepted as a valid operating system and is widely used across many industries. Open source technologies have provided a very powerful system -Linux- which if skillfully deployed has a lot to offer in terms of stability, reliability and ease of management. We at Techmax, have taken the time to understand the intricacies behind the underlying architecture and features, and thus best suited to deploy Linux at both the enterprise and small business level. Our technical team has carefully studied and tested these technologies to ensure that they are stable and usable. We have deployed the services for different customers. The following server functionalities are available under the Linux platform to fully support an enterprise business model. _______________________________________________________________________________________

Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

The Enterprise Linux for servers comes in two flavors, which offer platforms for both the corporate and small business environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS– this platform is designed for mission-critical applications, data centers and e-commerce applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES- designed for mid-range severs; Linux ES thrives on file servers, application servers, mail web servers.

Server Feature Summary:

File and print server:  includes FTP, NFS, and Samba. These will cater and allow users to share data files and printing resources within the enterprise while ensuring integrity and availability shared resources. Downtime is rare, and this solution allows you to concentrate on your core businesses, while Linux takes care of your data and IT resources.

Mail and Web servers: with the emerging Internet trends and evolving technology trends, most organizations require an Internet presence. Our recommendation for mail server is to run a stable version of Postfix mail server, on a Zimbra collaboration suite. This solution provides reliable mail delivery and sharing of resources that enhance employee productivity.
Mission critical web applications can rest on the bleeding version of Apache web server (most popular web server of choice as voted by net craft) and your business is ensured of high availability on the Internet. Unlike its peers, apache has the least of exploits and vulnerabilities making it the platform of choice to host your web site, and e-commerce applications.

LDAP Server: Open_LDAP is the only true Directory server out other with the rest being only implementations of Open_LDAP. To gain full advantage of the LDAP services, we recommend the use of Open LDAP in the enterprise running on a Linux platform. This allows you as the administrator to tweak and define your organizational structure as it is. The benefits are countless with the end users   enjoying a really transparent network, and they need not worry of where resources are residing as they are delivered in a transparent fashion, right to their desktops.

Authentication: Security is a major concern to any organization, both with internal users as well as Internet users. The trends among the attackers are becoming more sophisticated by the day at an alarming rate, thus there is need for a lasting solution to address the hostile Internet environment. Linux offers suitable solutions to counter the threats that may lead to data loss and compromise of information integrity within the enterprise.
Our consulting team has a myriad of solutions that can sit at the different layers of the IT architecture to provide the necessary security checks in order to allow smooth flow of data while ensuring security and integrity of the same.

Databases: Enterprise Linux offers support for various leading open source databases among them: Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL

Latest Developments:

Red Hat Linux has undergone many changes over the years and below are some highlights on the new improvements.

Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure

Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4 provides the most stable and robust commercial product based on the Linux community's 2.6.9 kernel.  As a result, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4 kernel offers numerous improvements over earlier kernels, including many enhanced algorithms and features:

• Generic logical CPU scheduler: Handles multi-core and hyper threaded CPUs.
• Object-based Reverse Mapping VM: Improved performance in memory constrained systems.
• Read Copy Update: SMP algorithm optimization for operating system data structures.
• Multiple I/O schedulers: Selectable based on the application environment.
• Enhanced SMP & NUMA support: Improved performance and scalability for large servers.
• Network interrupt mitigation (NAPI): Improved

New security capabilities

Provision of sophisticated security capabilities has been a specific development focus of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.4 release. New features include:

• Mandatory Access Control: Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) provides a MAC infrastructure that complements the existing Discretionary Access Control security features provided by the standard Linux environment. In a MAC-based environment, application capabilities and privileges are set by predefined policies and enforced by the kernel. This prevents errant applications from compromising system security.
• Memory management enhancements: Several features, including Exec Shield and Position Independent Executables, combine to prevent applications from being exploited by attacks such as buffer overflows.