Our usage of Samba is being questioned with regards to being "non-standard" as against Windows NT servers. As the Samba Survey has been defunct for a while, I wonder if: a) there is any suitable advocacy document listing large and famous users of Samba? b) If not I would be happy to summarise responses from those prepared to go public. I am especially interested in Universities and those in the UK above all (to demonstrate that we are not unusual!). Thanks, -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,| | Peter.Polkinghorne@brunel.ac.uk +44 1895 274000 x2561 UK | -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Peter Polkinghorne <Peter.Polkinghorne@brunel.ac.uk>]> Our usage of Samba is being questioned with regards to being > "non-standard" as against Windows NT servers.(:> b) If not I would be happy to summarise responses from those prepared > to go public. I am especially interested in Universities and those > in the UK above all (to demonstrate that we are not unusual!).I'm at a university in the US. My dept teaches CAD, mostly CATIA on AIX (IBM RS/6000 workstations). About three years ago we opened an NT lab. (At the time, NT boxes were almost an order of magnitude cheaper.) We use the same entry-level CAD program on both platforms (CATIA/CADAM Drafting), so we needed to share model files between the two, so students could do homework / practice work without being tied to whichever platform they used in class. I initially set up Samba 1.9.17, then 1.9.18. It worked ok but would occasionally wedge itself due to oplock bugs. (Oplock support was new in 1.9.18.) My boss was unhappy, so we bought a bunch of licenses for Hummingbird NFS Maestro (NFS client s/w for NT). It basically didn't work at all -- we never did track the problem down, but something about our CAD package really didn't like it. That little experiment lasted about a week. Back to Samba 1.9.18, then 2.0.x. Those oplock problems went away with 2.0 and we've had very very few problems since. Naturally, Samba comes in handy for a lot of other things around here besides the student workspaces. For example, we develop all our own manuals and course materials using WordPerfect on NT, but this sort of thing requires a lot of image capturing on Unix. Samba makes it trivial to move such files around. Before Samba we were stuck with FTP. My latest Samba deployment was down the hall where they do things like engineering stress analysis. They were using FTP as well, to shuttle MSC.Nastran models around between NT and HP-UX. Now they map their home directories. Honestly, I don't think they want to go back either. Peter
On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, Peter Polkinghorne wrote:> > Our usage of Samba is being questioned with regards to being "non-standard" > as against Windows NT servers. As the Samba Survey has been defunct for > a while, I wonder if: > > a) there is any suitable advocacy document listing large and famous users > of Samba? > > b) If not I would be happy to summarise responses from those prepared to go > public. I am especially interested in Universities and those in the UK > above all (to demonstrate that we are not unusual!).At Oregon State University (in the US, but oh well), we use samba to provide users access to their home directories from windows machines running in the library, the computer labs, and the dorms. They can also access them from anywhere else on campus. Samba runs on a Sun Solaris E450 machine with 150GB of disk space reserved for home directories (we give a 50MB quota standard). We still have an NT PDC and a couple BDCs for authentication purposes. Samba is configured as 'security = domain', so it passes authentication to the "real" NT machines. We have about 15,000 accounts using this system right now, with several hundred active SMB connections during the regular school year. Why did we choose to host the home directories on a Unix machine instead of NT? I wasn't involved in the decision-making process, but I can make some guesses. We have much more confidence in the reliability of the Solaris operating system compared to NT. Unix is also more flexible, allowing us to easily run other services on the same machine. For our situation, quota support was an obvious necessity, and we get that right out of the box with Solaris. We also needed to provide access for Macs on campus, so we used the netatalk package. Netatalk performs much better than Services for Macintosh on NT. Samba is an excellent piece of software, very well maintained and very flexible, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it. Andy Morgan ORST Support Oregon State University