[lug] Samba in business

[Harris, James]

Are you running Active Directory Native mode on your 2000 domain, or is it
mixed mode?  That might be your only major catch.

I have been using Samba for a few years now and haven't had any issues with
it, however, I can not speak as to whether or not it will integrate well
with Active Directory.  I seem to think that it does not (unless you are
completely crazy and try to use M$'s Unix compatibility stuff.)  Disclaimer:
I'm speaking based on cursory knowledge.  (a.k.a. out of my posterior.)

I believe that your concerns for patches suddenly breaking a system is
valid.  However, so far I have not seen it happen on my Windows 2000 system
yet (I use it with a Samba server heavily every day.)

Unfortunately I can't offer any more opinion than that.  If it was a Window
NT 4.0 based domain, I would highly recommend going to Samba/Linux.  It
works wonders when running in that environment.

Someday I'll get about to testing it with AD, but for now, that's all I
know.  Anyone else have any experience with Samba and AD yet, I'd love to
hear about it.

Regards,
Jim Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: Kyle Moore [mailto:kmoore at mooreimages.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2002 12:03
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] Samba in business


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



_______________________________________________
Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug