12,000 Users On Samba!

[stevenma at lion.shu.edu]

Hi, we are very seriously looking into Samba to provide file services to
our 12,000 users.  Out of these users, we can get anywhere from 2000 to
4000 logged in at the same time (we're a University)  Basically my
questions are as follows:


1)  Does anyone run Samba for this many (or more) users?  If so, I'd love
some feed back!

2)  What sort of machines does this require (we're thinking of a S/390 and
an IBM SP2 running AIX) and how much memory are we talking?  I've read that
the first smbd process is about 800k, but what about a few thousand running
at once?

3)  Is it possible to run Samba on one huge machine, or is splitting it up
into several/many UNIX machines a better idea, and why?

Any replies to this are appreciated!

Thanks,

Matt Stevenson
Seton Hall University