[Samba] What project should I use ?

[Phil Brutsche]

Oooh, I think I should add some of my know-how...

John H Terpstra wrote:
 > Oh Intrepid One,
 >
 > You ask such amazing questions! Of course you will excuse a little bias
 > on my part I am sure.
 >
 > Without doubt I'd use Samba. Right now the stable version is 2.2.7a (as
 > of this morning).

I second that suggestion.

 > I'd build a box using 3WARE IDE RAID - it's faster and more cost
 > effective than SCSI is today.

I dunno about the performance, but the price is certianly right.

 > If price point is an issue, check out the Tyan K7 2462 motherboard. You
 > might like to deck it out with two MP2G+ CPUs (cheap but effective). I'd
 > look at 4 IBM 80GB+ 7200rpm IDE drives off the RAID storage (on the 3WARE
 > 7500-4 controller) and one 60GB 7200rpm IDE boot drive on which I'd
 > install my OS.

For the boot drive I would use a 40GB or 60GB RAID1 using a 2-port 3ware 
card.  There's nothing quite like the hell of that lone hard drive going bad 
at an inopprotune time.

Watch out for the hardware RAID5 on those 3ware cards.  The performance on
those is... disappointing to say the least.

On one of my servers switching from hardware RAID5 to software RAID5 tripled
(!!!) throughput.  I went from 15MB/sec writing to 50MB/sec writing and 
30MB/sec reading to 75MB/sec reading (aka a saturated PCI bus).  I expect it 
to go faster, at least when reading, once I put the controller (I was using 
a 7500-4) in a 64-bit slot.

An excellent solution would be to get a 7500-8 - 2 ports for booting, and 4 
of the other 6 in a JBOD for use with software RAID.

If you use IDE drives with software RAID5 dual CPUs are a must.

 > Consider 1Gb/s ethernet to an etherswitch that has 1 Gb/s port and the
 > rest 100Mb/s.

Gigabit could be considered overkill.

 > PS: The 3WARE IDE RAID give you an I/O bandwidth of up to 452MB/s,
 > compared with 320 Mbits/s on fastest SCSI. Big difference in
 > poerformance!

Be aware that those are pure numbers that, unfortunately, don't translate 
into the real world.

My experience is that the U320 SCSI will easily give the same throughput but 
with substatianlly lower CPU usage if you use software RAID.

If you use hardware RAID they won't even be in the same ballpark.

 > I'd also seriously look at updating all workstations to a common OS
 > platform. It will make your life of administration a lot more peaceful.

I second this as well.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at optimumdata.com