Getting somewhere in my samba adventures... slowly

[Paul J Collins]

>>>>> "Gerry" == Gerry George <ggeorge at digisolv.com> writes:

    Gerry> Just had this idea.

    Gerry> How about running NT4 under VMWare to act as the PDC and
    Gerry> have Samba on the same box as your "normal" server?

    Gerry> Anyone tried this as yet?  Does NT4 run under VMWare?

NT4 runs fine under VMWare.  However, for it to work properly as a
PDC, it will need a unique IP address, and for Linux to support two IP
addresses on a interface (this is where my knowledge turns to pure
speculation because I don't know how interface aliasing is implemented
on Linux) the NIC may need to run in promiscuous mode, where the
kernel must examine *every* datagram that comes over the wire to see
if the IP address is one it owns.  This can cause a major CPU load
with some brands of NIC.  *PLEASE* take these comment re aliasing with
a pinch of salt; comments from people who know about Linux's IP
aliasing mechanism would be welcome.

It might be interesting to try the VMWare path, but I would suggest
that if you want to get this working quickly with minimum risk, it
would be wise to find a box somewhere to put NT Server on.  I have put
NT Server running as a PDC on an old 48M Pentium with Exchange 4.0 and
it ran fine, if slowly.  The major issue is the RAM available, as NT
DCs load the entire SAM database into RAM when they boot.  I believe
the SAM overhead is roughly 1K per user account and 0.5K per machine
account.

Paul.

-- 
Paul Collins <sneakums at eircom.net> - - - - - [ A&P,a&f ]
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