[Samba] Samba limitations

[Rick Segeberg]

My company is seriously considering moving our existing NetWare 4.11
file servers to Samba Linux servers (Red Hat 8).  Our current servers
hold (on average) 400GB of data each (some much more) on various volumes
(our largest volume at this time is 400GB).  Most of this space is used
by multimedia files which are >1GB up to 4GB (yes, for a single file).
We have about 200 users who have access to various directories across
all of the servers, although we hope to consolidate that by making a
separate server(s) for each major department.

1) What kind of limitation (if any) does Samba have in being a file
server?  By that I mean are there limitations on file sizes, volume
sizes, number of files, number of users connected, performance issues,
etc.  

2) Has anyone found a good way to add space to an existing volume
(something easy to do in NetWare) via RAID, stripping or whatever?  In
other words, I will need to add space in the future by adding a hard
drive and spanning an existing volume across that new hard drive.  I
know I can do it via mount points, but that gets messy, and only adds
space to the directory structure in which you mount the new drive,
rather than to the entire volume.  We will be using RAID 5 (hardware
based), but even after adding a drive to the array, you somehow have to
expand the volume across the new space.

3) What are the gotchas on file system rights?  We do not have a PDC at
this time, but when Samba 3.0 is final, would like to use our existing
Windows 2000 AD domain (which is not actually used as a domain right
now, but only for Exchange/Outlook functionality) to help manage those
rights.

I would appreciate your feedback.  Samba is my file server at home, but
that doesn't even compare to what we're looking at here.  Any advice,
what not to do, etc. is welcome.


- Rick.






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