No more Samba for me

[Happy Hacker]

I give up.  I'm going to run NT instead of Samba.  It all started out as a 
nice idea.  Save a school a few thousand dollars they'd pay Microsoft 
and put Linux/Samba up instead of a new NT server.  Well, I've tried,
I've read your bugs, I've done as much as I can.... and I'm going to give 
in and run NT.

I can run an install program on 30 computers off my shared Samba 
drives so it isn't like I didn't get very far.  I can do multiple drives, have 
many programs run.  But the persistent bugs that applications display 
on Samba drives are just too much hassle to support.  Perhaps there is 
a winning solution and a way to set it up, but the documentation on the 
samba site is just lame.  There is no solid example of the best way to 
use the parameters together to form a solid system.  The email system 
on the web returns responses not to use the email system on the web.  
The newsgroup here didn't even give me on response to my question.  
The other people out there seem to be getting similar but different errors.

I wish it was a workable solution.  I wish I wasn't going to throw 
thousands more dollars at Microsoft.  I wish I could tell other schools 
that Samba worked.  But it doesn't, at least not without a lot of support, 
poking, prodding, and hand holding.

The latest error is that students who are using a program they loaded off 
the shared drive suddenly can't see the shared drive during opening a 
file and they get an error.  But a minute later the drive is there for them 
again.  Along with this error, the server logs PAM_pwdb authentication 
error for that student. But... the student was using the system already 
and was logged in.  Maybe its not even samba for THIS error.  But 
Samba 2.0.3 started thousands of processes which killed the server.  
Samba 2.0.6 fixed this situation and runs fine for some programs but 
not for others.  I've tried op_locks=yes (and no).

Just thought I'd let you know a place where samba was a failure so in 
the future you can think about better ways to reach the people who want 
to use it.  Tomorrow I go and install NT.