[lug] Samba in business

[D. Stimits]

I do not personally run or use samba, so take my observations with a
grain of salt. I understand that on the permissions side of the issue,
you might find the ACL's that run under the XFS journaling filesystem
(from SGI) quite useful there (I recall seeing something about that in
the past). I'd recommend you go to the SGI email list and find out more.
The people on that list could probably answer a lot of questions about
your intended setup, especially if you ask in relation to how XFS would
help or hurt it.
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/faq.html
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/mail.html

I've personally been using XFS since last spring, the main difficulty is
that it isn't part of the main kernel yet (probably will require
patching or other download from SGI for any 2.4.x, it is working its way
into 2.5.x now), plus the boot image is rather large if you use a scsi
or other system other than IDE during boot.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

Kyle Moore wrote:
> 
> I am considering replacing our Novell and Windows 2000 file servers with
> samba on Linux. I'm stuck with Windows 2000 Active Directory and
> Exchange (god help me) but would like to use a more stable, secure and
> cost-effective solution where possible.
> 
> The catch is this...I hate risk. Can a samba server reliably replace a
> Windows file server? I'm not worried about stability of the server. What
> I am more worried about is continued functionality. Does Samba
> authenticate to Windows 2000 as well as it did with NT? Can it enforce
> permissions and policies from Windows 2000? Can Microsoft just release a
> patch for their desktop operating systems that suddenly makes samba not
> work? Are there commercial solutions of samba on line as a file server?
> What are your experiences?
> 
> I have a little over 200 users. Most of them are still on Windows 98 but
> we are moving to Windows 2000. Right now everyone authenticates to
> Novell and print and file services are provided through Novell as well.
> We do have some people (most execs) that are ALSO on a Windows 2000
> domain. I was given the responsibilities at this point. I want to get
> everyone standardized and it is obvious upgrading Novell is not an
> option (political reasons).
> 
> The "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" way to do this is migrate
> everyone over to Windows 2000 domain and do everything through there. My
> problem with this is that I know the headache that would be to maintain.
> 
> --
> Kyle
> 
> --
> Kyle Moore
> Systems Administrator
> Trust Company of America
> 
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