Hi, I've been asked to research the possibility of changing our site from Novell to Samba. We've got 10,000+ client machines with about 30,000 users and currently use about 200-300 novell servers. I'm reasonably familiar with Samba but not on this scale. If anyone can point me towards a similar site then I'd be grateful. Currently we have a accouting system for each user for printing services, access to home directories and installed software (some licenced), mail delivered to the Novell server using mercury and read using pegasus (normally). Questions I need answered are general ones such as: What problems were encountered initially, and subsequently? How much can samba do out the box and how much custom software is needed? How can we retain the print accounting services? How good is samba with licenced software? Will it scale to this number of machines/users? What spec of hardware will we need for the servers? How well does samba handle user filestore quotas? Thanks Mike -- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1998 Mike Richardson, Rm G100D, Manchester Computing University of Manchester, M13 9PL. doctor@mcc.ac.uk, 0161 275-6009 -------------------------------------------------------------------- "If I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you!" - Chuck Norris "If anything happens to my daughter I have a 45 and shovel" Clueless
Mike Richardson said:> I've been asked to research the possibility of changing our site from > Novell to Samba. We've got 10,000+ client machines with about 30,000 > users and currently use about 200-300 novell servers. I'm reasonably > familiar with Samba but not on this scale. If anyone can point me > towards a similar site then I'd be grateful.Well we are not so big - around half the size and currently only have around 500 active client machines (out of a possible 4,000) - but this is growing plus we are a UK academic site.> Currently we have a accouting system for each user for printing > services, access to home directories and installed software (some > licenced), mail delivered to the Novell server using mercury and read > using pegasus (normally).We use a separate UNIX MTA for mail (PP) and have IMAP & POP servers for access from PC. For printing accounting is an area were we are looking at the Aegis PALMS system - commercial. However we do use Samba for file and print services.> Questions I need answered are general ones such as:> What problems were encountered initially, and subsequently? How much > can samba do out the box and how much custom software is needed? How > can we retain the print accounting services? How good is samba with > licenced software? Will it scale to this number of machines/users? > What spec of hardware will we need for the servers? How well does > samba handle user filestore quotas?We found that Samba worked pretty much out of the box - although we have already got a set of UNIX (Sun) file servers using NFS and AMD - which also provides user quotas. Licensing is handled separately from Samba. I have posted appplication server loading figures - in Summary we think that 1 Sun Ultra 5 can serve applications to around 60 classroom and 400 office machines. Do contact me if you want more details ... -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,| | Peter.Polkinghorne@brunel.ac.uk +44 1895 274000 x2561 UK | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------