Advice on Samba for large site

[Peter Polkinghorne]

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 ...

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| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
| Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk   +44 1895 274000 x2561       UK          |
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