Hi team! At work I have several small branch offices with ~5 PCs each. All PCs are member of a Samba4 domain, whose DCs are on the headquarters (linked by consumer grade VPNs) I want to ship "some small, cheap, reliable and magical device" to each branch, in order to provide just 2 things: * AD replication * File shares That't it, period. Nothing fancy. Suggestions??? What do you use for this purpose?? Thanks a lot. George
G> At work I have several small branch offices with ~5 PCs each. All PCs are G> member of a Samba4 domain, whose DCs are on the headquarters (linked by G> consumer grade VPNs) G> I want to ship "some small, cheap, reliable and magical device" to each G> branch, in order to provide just 2 things: G> * AD replication G> * File shares If I/O performance isn't a huge issue [and it probably shouldn't be for a 5 client branch office], how about some used Dell Optiplexes [You can use anything, but good Optiplex 755/760/780's go cheap on the 'bay] I've picked up 755's /C2D-3Ghz/4G RAM plus old crappy used disks for <$100 780s can be had for $150 or so, depending. Sure, they are SATA drives, no ECC memory etc - but for a small work-group, with some good backup they should be more than adequate. Pick up a few extras for hot-spares and you can do all your own warranty service with a <4hr window at a very attractive price! :) [The only things likely to fail are power-supplies and/or disks. The hot-spares takes care of PS problems (as well as anything else), and disks would be an issue with any setup.] I'd obviously drop new disk(s) in, and run them a while to weed out early failures. Sure they burn more power than some "appliance" - but for the cost, it seems no-brainer. If you need something higher end - but still not server class - Precision workstations are also quite cheap. These can use ECC memory. [unbuffered] Lots of drive bays. Serious tanks. --- I love the idea of a low-power high-performance appliance. A NAS will work fine for storage, but it's not going to act as a DC etc. [At least none that I'm aware of and would trust.] Even appliances sorta like this, that I've seen, are easily five times the price. -Greg
On Tue, Dec 2, 2014 at 2:26 AM, Gregory Sloop <gregs at sloop.net> wrote:> I love the idea of a low-power high-performance appliance. A NAS will > work fine for storage, but it's not going to act as a DC etc. [At least > none that I'm aware of and would trust.] > > Even appliances sorta like this, that I've seen, are easily five times the > price. > > -Greg >Howcome no one has though of this before?? What is the "Samba equivalent", as the Alix 2D3 is for SOHO routers?? There's a market gap right there... Or maybe I am the one who thinks this way? Still, thanks for your advice! You are right, so far Optiplexes or similar pretty much fulfill all the requirementes I mentioned before: they are cheap, good looking, silent and with some care also pretty reliable. Best regards! George
On 12/01/2014 08:55 PM, George wrote:> Hi team! > > At work I have several small branch offices with ~5 PCs each. All PCs are > member of a Samba4 domain, whose DCs are on the headquarters (linked by > consumer grade VPNs) > > I want to ship "some small, cheap, reliable and magical device" to each > branch, in order to provide just 2 things: > * AD replication > * File shares > > That't it, period. Nothing fancy. > > Suggestions??? What do you use for this purpose??I am a low-level user, and have been running an HP SFF with a 1TB sata drive and 1TB USB backup drive with ClearOS. I am moving off this. I have committed to ARM platforms for the power savings. At this point I don't know at all about the performance. I AM running my mailserver (Redsleeve6/Postfix/mysql/spammassasin/clamav/amavis) on a Cubietruck and it seems to be handling my mail load. The Cubieboard2 and Cubietruck both use the Allwinner A20 (1Gb mem/100Mb lan vs 2Gb mem/1Gb lan). Both have sata. The Wandboard quad is $40 more than the CT, but a quad cpu (vs duo). A number of linuxes are available for the various armv7 boards. The armv8s (64bit) are now coming out, but still pricey for my budget. But going from 70-90w with the SFF to 2-3w for the arm system is VERY attractive. If you REALLY want a Samba appliance you really have to focus on ARM. (IMHO).
Robert Moskowitz schrieb am 10.12.2014 02:54:> I AM running my mailserver ... on a Cubietruck and it seems to be > handling my mail load.I run my AD on a Cubietruck. Installing Debian Testing and moving the root file system to the Sata disk was really a pain. But anyway: for my minimaistic arrangement, it works very good. Updates pretty often break the self compiled Bind 9.9, but a simple 'make install' typically fixes this. In the beginning, when the file system was still on the SD-card it was pretty sluggish. But since I got the SSD hooked up to it, it works very decent. I have a dedicated file server with a big raid, and I don't think the Cubie is crippling the performance of the file server. I can recommend the Cubie, but it is not nearly as easy to operate as a Raspberry Pi. But the Cubie is much more responsive than the Pi.> But going from 70-90w with the SFF to 2-3w for the arm system is VERY > attractive.If You need a file server, presumably You want a big conventional HD, which will cost You in the order of 10W alone (on the line side, i.e. including the losses of the power supply). Then You might want a Gigabit switch ... So most of us will end up with much more than just 2..5 W. But agreed, the Arm will bring the power drain down by a substantial amount. Personally I shut the file server down late at night - and wake it up from a SSH shell on the router or the Cubie. Not running everything 24/7 is the second approach to reduce the waste of energy. Best regards Peter