Samba Usage (University especially)

andrew morgan morgan at orst.edu
Sun Jul 16 14:41:48 GMT 2000



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



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