> > If the clients are windows, it will let you write locally > while the network is down and sync later. Works fine with > samba -- you can even redirect "My Documents" etc to the samba > home share to have a reasonably user-friendly and network > fault tolerant environment.
If our windows servers are down then the users can't even login to the local machine as they don't have accounts there. We enforce Mandatory Roaming profiles as the only way to keep our sanity and keep the desktops under control and standard. So no servers nothing happens - fortunately they are not quite as unstable as some think! If we are talking that the wire itself is not happening then having a SAMBA server is not going to help much :-) We are just starting to deploy some thin clients using LTSP to be able to re-deploy some of our older machines, so far the experience is all positive and we have removed the HDD as they were the main hardware problem with the systems anyway, so everything is over the wire. But with judicous uses of switches you can confine the traffic to an appropriate segment and only traffic directed outside of that segment comes over the main wire. We figure 15 - 20 machines to one server (but when we talk server we mean a P4 desktop machine with say 512 or 1GB RAM, which without monitor is around $1300 - $1400 or about $70 per workstation - pretty good value I believe, add to that some switches and 20 old machines going back into use is going to cost around $3000 still good value (ignoring installation costs). And given the continually dclining IT market I woiuld think that a lot of companies are interested in saving $ on hardware and software - or else they would still be out there buying, and from my education viewpoint it is essential to get every ounce of use out of every $ spent. Just my (non-technical) take on the issue. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
