Currently, our company has about 15 employees working in a central office. We have a single file server for sharing various documents, this server is a Dell Poweredge.
We have 2 websites which are currently being served by GoDaddy, but we would like to host the servers ourselves. We also have 10 retail locations around the company that need to be able to connect to our websites continuously throughout the day.
The plan is to purchase a PowerEdge 2900III server (2x quad core processors, 4GB ram, 6x73GBHDDs w/ RAID 5/1) as well as a Cisco ASA 5510 Firewall which will be in addition to the ISP-supplied router (IAD 2400, which I cannot personally configure, i must call ISP each time).
I have been researching the possibility of setting up the server inside a DMZ, but am weary of the security risks as the web server will be driven by a information-sensitive database on the web server.
One suggestion I heard was to set up the DMZ like such:
internet –> ISP Router (IAD) –> ASA firewall –> DMZ(web server) –> additional router (1800 possibly?) –> LAN
Would such a configuration be suitable and safe for both the web server that has sensitive information in it as well as the LAN? Or would it be highly recommended to set up an internal server on the LAN that could contain the sensitive database, and would be accessed constantly by the web server located on the DMZ?
An additional question, I know only the basics of Linux (took a course in Linux/Unix Sys. Admin.) so I got the idea of how Linux works, but am by no means an expert. Would it be wise to set up RH Enterprise or SUSE Enterprise on the web server? I.E. how difficult would it be to set up such a network/DMZ/Apache on Linux with only basic knowledge? Is it worth the added security of Linux or should I stay with what I am more comfortable with, which is Windows.
An additional note, the site is a PHP/MySQL driven site, so it naturally works well with Apache, further intriguing the Linux server idea…
Thoughts, suggestions?
