Replacing NT/Netware with Linux (LONG)
well, it's happening. my boss wants me to take the summer to evaluate
using Linux to run our labs as an alternative to Novell Netware and
Microsoft Windows NT.
We currently have 55 Pentium IIs and 40 Pentiums running Windows 95, and
30 iMacs running MacOS 8.6 in our labs.there are 6 labs in all, and
they each have one networked laser printer. right now, they all
authenticate, and use drive and printer mappings through an aging
Netware 3.12 server.
I have Linux (Debian, of course) running on my machine (no Windows
here!) and i have Samba and netatalk running. the Macs already rely on
my machine for file services, but not print services. the Samba share
is just to participate in our workgroup administratively.
My questions/concerns as i begin planning this are many. One has to do
with Linux itself: Can i rely on it to do a good job with this? Our
server will be a fair machine (in fact, it should arrive tomorrow):
PII-350 (room for a second)
128MB RAM
2x9.1GB SCSI drives
DAT drive
this is a machine that we would need to grow, obviously. what i want to
do is just bring one or two of the smaller labs up with it for testing.
With only two drives, i won't be able to RAID5 the thing as i was
hoping, but i thought i saw someplace where RAID5 isn't Linux's Very
Good Friend yet anyway.
As far as backing up, is anyone using Amanda? i am interested in this as
it would give me a chance to back up other machines (ahem, mine) with
this drive as well. Can Amanda back up Win95/NT/Macs as well? if not, is
there an Free Software solution that would?
My second main concern is with Samba. Can i do authentication with it?
The server's role would be departmental (ie., about 10 office machines)
as well as the labs, with 7 networked printers. other than the 30
iMacs, there will be a couple more Macs, and then my Debian Linux box,
and the rest are Win95/98 machines. So i'm going to be placing a lot of
responsibility on Samba to make this work. I basically need it to
function to the client just like an NT server would. we don't have any
software that requires NT on the server end, don't need it to do
web or ftp or mail, just as a traditional F&P server. right now our
offices are only doing local 'authentication', that is, not relying on
a server. so there's no PDC/BDC conflicts. it'll be a new server to the
offices, a replacement for Netware to the labs.
Print queueing through Samba/netatalk has be concerned as well. we
would not be opposed to scarfing an old 486 and sticking Debian on it
to just handle the printers.
To ease the migration, i'm planning to get ncpfs and ipx loaded on this
machine so i can copy from the existing Netware volumes. it's
summertime, so the labs are hardly used, anyway, and i'm using Imagecast
to handle that stuff so it's a piece of cake on the client side.
I SOOOOO want this to be sucessful. My boss is observant enough to see
that NT isn't as reliable as BigBrotherBill wants us to think, and even
simple changes require a system reboot. Client licences for NT are free
for us through an agreement selling our soul to Microsoft. Netware,
while a superior system for our needs than NT, is not free, and very
costly. Linux seems to have a place here. I have certainly demonstrated
its usefulness and stability to him. i can't believe he'd give me a
project like this! i'm so excited!
please let me know, if any of you have done this before, what i can
expect. as soon as i can get my hands on this machine i'm whipping out
my Debian floppies. i'm very interested in any of your horror/success
stories, web sites you can point me to, etc. thanks very much.
--
eric Farris eafarris@bigfoot.com www.bigfoot.com/~eafarris
Microcomputer Support Specialist
Academic Computing
Frostburg State University www.frostburg.edu
This message composed in an MFCE (Microsoft Free Computing Environment)
The moment i let go of it was the moment i got more than i could handle
The moment i jumped off of it was the moment i touched down...
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