[Samba] Urgent: Integrating a NAS-Filer in a Samba-PDC controlled domain

[Andrew Bartlett]

> Manuel Elgorriaga Kunze wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I'm using Samba 2.2.5 on SuSE 7.3kKernel 2.4.16 as a PDC for 50 users
> (soon 80), serving files and CUPS-printqueues for our Win9x boxes.
> Besides some occasional, but nonetheles quite irritating,
> locking-problems, the Samba-solution works fine and reliable for our
> pool of about 20 GB of data. In a few months, we should get new
> infrastructure and we plan to do audio-recording directly on NAS-filer
> through a 100Mbit network.
> 
> My problem is now, that none of the NAS-filers of the vendors we've
> tested (NetApp, Procom) can be integrated in a Samba-PDC/domain: you
> can only choose to use "shared mode" or full integration in a
> MS-NT-PDC or MS-Win2k-ADS system. It just doesn't work using a
> Samba-PDC, no matter what fine-tuning you try to do, and vendors are
> well aware of this problem, but they don't work on it because it's a
> "very small market" (textual citation from a discussion). So: anybody
> does have a commercial NAS-Filer running in a Samba domain? 

The new Quantum Gardian line should work fine - but you will need to use
Samba HEAD on the PDC.  (No prizes for guessing what's inside ;-).

We are aware of the issues with NetApp - and need to determine how we
differ from Win2k.  Unfortunetly due to the relitive market size, NetApp
is unable to put much time into this from their end, but have given us
some assistance.  

> If not: is
> it reasonable to buy an Intel-server with a 500 GB RAID-5
> SCSI-disk-subsystem, put a Linux kernel >=2.4.16 on it, use LVM/ext3
> with ACL's or LVM/XFS (from SGI, with integrated ACL's) and use it for
> simultaneously harddisk recording over the network by up to 10
> WinXP-Workstations? What kind of issues should I look for (serverside
> HW, SW, configuration)? What problems are likely to occur?

This is the basic argument over 'why pay this much for a NAS'.  Most of
the things that you can do with a NAS box you can do anyway - it just
depends on how much time you want to spend setting it up etc.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net