[Samba] Re: Migrate BACK to WINDOWS -> Talk me out of it QUICK

[Chris McKeever]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 14:34:24 +0100, Simon Hobson
<shobson-lists at colony.com> wrote:
> Dragan Krnic wrote:
> >I think I'm clear about what this young Jedi knight
> >is asking. His conundrum is that he'll end up with
> >way too many servers if he implements both a Windows
> >Terminal Server and a Samba file and printer server
> >on separate machines.

I think Dragan and Simon summarized what I was looking for extremely well. 

> 
> That's how I read it too. Does he keep his 10 Samba servers and add
> another 10 Windows servers to do terminal services, or does he put
> his file and print services on the same Windows servers and only have
> 10 servers to manage ?
> 
> I suppose a few things for him to think about would be :
> 
> 1) Does he intend separating File/print services from Terminal
> services (for performance reasons ?) in the future ? If so, then it
> would make sense to leave the file/print servers that are already
> there as they are rather than migrate them to the one server and
> separate them out again later.

I think - if there are to be tsrvs in each location - then the
integration of that and file/print would stay assuming they were never
merged to start with .. I havent yet run any benchmarks to see how
long files take to print over the network

> 
> 2) Are there any specific management benefits either way ? It's not
> so much "are 10 servers easier to manage than 20" but "is a group of
> Windows servers easier to manage than a group of Windows servers plus
> a group of Linux/Samba servers". This is very much down to the
> experience of the individual/team, but I would guess that since they
> already have these servers then they are probably also comfortable
> with administering them.


What it does is alleviate the need to administer workstations, since
they will all be thin clients.  So in essence, for each terminal
server I roll, I take away 5-7 XP workstations.  Thus reducing my
adminisering to a single box that has been semi-designed for remote
administration

What that ad though is that if the remote TSRV goes down I am semi
screwed, I will have a backup central one that I can easily deploy the
thin clients into


> 
> 3) Are there any performance/reliability/capacity issues with the
> existing servers ? If so then it may work out cheaper to spec the new
> servers to handle both roles than it is to upgrade/replace the
> existing hardware.

samba servers are working termendously - and although are older
machines, are handling the load without hiccup

> 
> 4) What is your budget, and what are the relative costs ? Does the
> per-user Terminal Services licence cover the file and print services
> when the user is using only the terminal services ? If so then there
> is minimal cost to combine the two services. On the other hand, if
> you have to add File/Print client licences then this could add up to
> a fair wad of cash.

thats where M$ bites you - in order to use TSRV you need file/print
CALS as well - the way they put it is that a standard CAL is for
authentication (this covers file/print), a T-CAL is for using terminal
services

> 
> 5) Other than File/Print services, are there any other reasons for
> keeping a Linux server on site ? 

necuase the linux boxes are a joy to administer - a windows controlled
domain is not as much

Eg, do you want to run the ISC DHCP
> server (no Windows version I believe), or will the MS DHCP server do
> you ?
> 

we dont do too much crazy with dhcp, so vaniall either way


> Just a few things to ponder over. But at the end of the day, everyone
> has to make a decision on what works for them - and leaving
> 'religious fervour' out of it, we can't answer it for him.
> 
> Simon
> 
> --