Thanks Brent and Robbie.
A bit of a surprising
response from an AD list.
Brent, maybe you can shed some light on
the cost calculations you offered. To me, I look at the XServe
for about $3000 with no storage (80 GB SATA) and then an array for $6000 (1TB, ATA
disks, no SCSI option). For about $5000, I can get a Dell server with almost as
much space and SCSI disks. Aside from software, am I missing something on the
hardware comparison?
On the software side,
-
Does throwing
Exchange into the mix affect your choice of OD?
-
Also, I
have seen that file service performance from Macs to AD servers is poor. And it
sounds like Microsoft’s lack of support for higher-level AFP versions
will assure that into the future.
-
Would it
make sense to run AD and just use an XServe for file
service for the Macs? AD will handle authentication. Will it handle permissions
on the XServe shares?
Finally, do you know of any good resources
for information about planning this sort of change?
Thanks again.
nme
From: Brent
Westmoreland [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2004 1:51 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [ActiveDir] Mixed
network PC and Mac -> AD or XServe
My $0.02
In the existing situation, with 70 machines at one site, half macs and half
PCs. The choice is actually a dead giveaway... Xserve's all the way. OS X
server with OpenDirectory and Samba 3 can handle the authentication needs of
the whole shop. You don't need Active Directory at all. Active Directory has
great scalability, replication, and enterprise level features but very little native support for clients other than
windows. OSX on the other hand can serve as a windows pdc and apple master
directory using the exact same user records right out of the box, but it has
lousy support for delegated administration and multimaster replication. The
only downside to using all XServes is the lack of group policy support for the
windows pc's, but if you only have 35, then so what.
Another positive to using os x as an entry level nos is that there are no
Client Access Licenses with OS X's unlimited version. For a company of 70
people this allows them to double, triple, even quadruple their numbers without
having to pay up every quarter for the new licenses they just bought. Not to
mention server hardware costs, for a pretty well loaded box and a well
negotiated apple deal you can plan to spend 4700 to 6500 dollars per apple
server, and that is cheap. You don't see HP and IBM offering small shops a big
discount on hardware, so they will pay close to retail for any servers that
they purchase.
Finally, you go with an all OS X server solution, and you have effectively
limited the dreaded 10th of the month server regression testing that we all
have to do for MS patches. Yes, OS X has operating system patches too, but I
have never had one apply that had a negative effect on my machine, and I mean
NEVER.
If the client had 200 people and plans to open 5 sites throughout North &
South America this year, I would have to say go with an AD solution. In the
meantime, I would ride the low-cost wave of apple, until AD implements better
alternative client support. Perhaps by then, OS X's solution will scale better
and no migration would be necessary. We'll have a better picture when 10.4 is
revealed.
On May 14, 2004, at 3:09 PM, Robbie Foust wrote:
I'm currently involved in migrating a network from
Netware to AD/OS X Server. The problem with running Windows servers in a Mac
invironment is that Microsoft has no plans to support the latest AFP version,
which kinda sucks for various reasons. (auto reconnect, etc)
Best way I can come up with is to use AD as the authenticator (and for group
policy support of Windows clients), and use OS X Server as the file server. The
trick is to be able to apply policies to OS X users through open directory.
There's supposed to be a way to use AD as the primary LDAP directory and pull
additional attributes from another "local" directory but haven't
quite figured it out yet. Samba can be configured to use Kerberos, but it's not
the default.
Macs can't really be managed from AD like Windows can. Same goes in the other
direction too. So ya kinda need both (AD and OD). In my scenario, I'm shooting
for single sign-on using Kerberos. To make it even more complicated, I would
really like to authenticate from a MIT Kerberos realm, but Samba doesn't have
support for that yet.
Documentation is very limited with it comes down to the fine details,
unfortunately.
Robbie Foust
OIT - Systems and Core Services
Duke University
Noah Eiger wrote:
Hello:
I need some advice about file service, directory management, and user
authentication in a mixed Windows/Mac environment. I have a magazine client
with approximately 70 users: half Macs, half
Windows. As you might expect, the Macs are the art department and editorial;
the PCs are business, advertising, etc. All workstations will either be
running OSX (most recent) or WinXP Pro. Currently, there is no NOS, and file
service is handled by a mixture of WinNT, Win2k, and AppleShare 9x.
My initial thought was to just let AD handle everything and spend the effort
on getting the Macs to play nice with the Windows servers. Exchange is
likely. However, the in-house IT guy wants to explore Apple's server
offerings.
So, the questions are: - Is the speed and quality of the Windows servers
sufficient for
Mac clients (many handling large image or graphics files)?
- Is AD "managing" of Macs and Mac users sufficient? - If there is a
reason to deploy an Apple server, can it be managed
by AD? That is, can it play like a Windows member server?
- Finally, is there any reason to entertain running the whole shop
under the Apple server and Open Directory?
Many thanks.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Noah M. Eiger
EIS Consulting for
PRBO Conservation Science
510-717-5742
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