Go with a GNU/Linux system and get the best of the two worlds: Unix power and cheap hardware
btw, I cannot believe they say managing a windows box is more comfortable, have you ever showed your boss how much time his NT admins need to spend to "easily" click trough endless number of windows? I always found Unix machine much faster to administer, and it can be done easily also remotely (and _securely_) through SSH. Let's not talk of automation through scripts, Windows simply does not exist in that field. Simo. On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 21:23, Wieprecht, Karen M. wrote: > I had samba working on an old Sun Enterprise server using a JBOD that was > managed with veritas volume manager (legacy stuff that had long outlived > it's usefulness). Management arbitrarily decided to replace the aging > Solaris server with a native Windows server without talking to me. I instead > tried to persuade them to use an SGI cluster I had been putting together and > use newer features of samba (winbind, domain authentication) for hosting > this data, but they weren't interested. > > When that old Solaris system started having problems, and the new windows > server wasn't online yet, I had to temporarily host the data on my SGI > cluster, a duo of servers that was running samba with winbind and domain > authentication. It was a very nice setup, either server in the pair could > serve the files, and we made user login scripts mount the shares from > whichever server reponded first. When we had to take the primary server > down for maintenance, we switched the login script to point them to the > secondary server's shares, had them log out and back in. While they worked > happily off of the secondary server, we did a half day's worth of > maintenance on the primary server without affecting the users. When we were > done, we put the login script back the way it was before, and the next > time they logged out and back in, they were again pointed to the primary > server with the secondary as a backup. > > Even after demonstrating how nice my configuration was and how seemlessly we > were able to do maintenance without affecting users, management and the > two NT guys I work with were still sold on using the Windows native server. > They claimed that it was cheaper to buy the hardware and easier to manage > permissions and file access rights with the native equipment (of course, > they are PC guys). My argument was that we could probably achieve the same > file access flexibility with UNIX ACLs (which previous staff had not enabled > on the UNIX side), and that the UNIX machines use RISC-based processors, a > completely different animal than the GHZ pentium processors, so they would > really have to come up with some benchmarks to compare the two systems. > They also weren't originally going to accommodate any easy file > interoperability with the UNIX users, they were going to make them use FTP > to move files between the UNIX machine and the windows server, and I argued > that this was removing capability that users were accustomed to having, not > a real crowd pleasing decision. > > Now they are experimenting with Microsoft SFU to make the Windows box allow > the UNIX machine to NFS mount its shares, and I have to say it does seem to > work pretty well. It tied right into NIS nicely, automatically mapped > matching usernames on either side, allows me to define mappings with > usernames that do not match, etc. But it still digs in my crawl though that > I never even got a chance to show what my cluster could do for them until > after management had already decided to buy the windows server, and even > after a nice demonstration of the UNIX cluster's capabilities, they are > still sold (arbitrarily) on using the native Windows box. > > How can I compare the performance of the two servers? Many of you started > out with Windows servers and migrated to samba to get better performance, > but my collegues have done the opposite. Am I blindly biased that UNIX is > better or is there a way I can get some real numbers to prove that te > windows server is a slower file server? > > The guys are always weighing the cost and ease of management against the > difference in performance (if there isn't much difference in performance, > go with what is cheaper and simpler to manage), and for them that is the > PC-native stuff. I feel like my UNIX skills are slowly getting pushed aside > and I'm not sure how to get real performance metrics. > > Help, feedback, condolences are all welcome. > > karen -- Simo Sorce - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Xsec s.r.l. via Durando 10 Ed. G - 20158 - Milano tel. +39 02 2399 7130 - fax: +39 02 700 442 399
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