On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 13:32, Jakub Krajcovic wrote: > Well, then linux has great news for you. Install samba, and read the > samba documentation project. It's about 500 pages of _really_ helpful > text. It will take some time, but sfter you sift through it, you will be > wanting to dump windows asap >
Hi, First, I'm replying to Jakub's note only because it's at the top of the list, but my thanks to everyone who answered. I appreciate all of your answers, whether you are pro or con on the idea of coexisting with Windows, but in some environments it's what's required. OK, so with some help from a guy who works on a related business we got my Gentoo box talking on the Windows network. I've been able to mount samba shares from the NT file server, and I'm printing to the printer on the network, although I'm just doing it through CUPS and not using the shared printer on the NT server like I would if I was running XP Pro. If managed to get Crossover Office installed and have Word and Excel running off of the file server, although my share is currently read only so I have to fix that. I don't have email yet as I have to decide whether to just use Outlook under CXOffice or try switching to Evolution. (Which I use at home and am writing from right now.) The advantage of sticking with Outlook would be that I save about 4GB of archived email traffic from my overseas engineering group. Maybe there's an LDAP solution or something else that will fix this for me and allow me to move everything to Evolution. I'll probably stick with Outlook in the short term and try to move to Evolution longer term, unless I find a better answer. Not overly important right now. All in all, very successful for about 2 hours invested. XP gone. Now, for a couple of responses: Norbert: Just because we are small doesn't mean that we just play games. We have about $40K USD invested in Windows financial software running on the servers and two ladies that use the Oracle and Sequal (sp?) servers while sitting at their desks with the client side apps. That stuff all has to run on Windows NT, so NT isn't going away. Grendel: Thanks for your help. You've always been great even since the Redhat days! Actually, the 'reason' for the server is *not* that it's a file server, as you guessed, but that it's a compute server. I get file server capabilities for free, right? ;-) BACKUPS: Since we have all this finance stuff running on NT we must have backups. After all, it's Windows. We have a daily backup, 6-week, tape-based rotational system running Veritas Backup Exec. All the important data gets backed up, so there's no reason for us to keep *any* files on our local machines. This way, when a workstation machine goes down it's only apps that get installed, and with Windows I just run Ghost every so often to fix a local problem created by one of us installing software. (We all do it, and we all pay for it!) Gabiel: I don't mind paying for it at all. Win NT is cheap. We built this machine based on a Dell Server in early 2001. It's never gone down once in over 3 years. Applications die, and I do reboot it once a month or so, but other than that we've only had a RAID drive go bad. Nothing was lost. People can talk about how cheap Linux is, and it is, but the right Windows setup doesn't have to cost much from a business perspective. (And again, Linux won't run this software anyway...) So, in closing, thanks for the responses. I look forward to more discussion, but I think I just brought Linux as a desktop to our office this afternoon. Cheers, Mark -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
