[Samba] Which distribution to rollout

[Christian Merrill]

Daniel Ramaley wrote:

>I run Samba on OpenBSD. It isn't Linux, but it is free and works very 
>well. It also isn't likely to go away or move to a less stable 
>development any time soon.
>
>On Thursday 23 September 2004 09:44 am, Chris McKeever wrote:
>  
>
>>we are running an older version of RH (7.3) - and I am getting
>>concerned that I may need to migrate off of it - but I dont know what
>>I should move to.  Trying to formulate ideas before it becomes a 'got
>>to do it now' scenario.
>>
>>I have some reservations about fedora - I just dont know how stable it
>>is for a production server (our services are mainly
>>samba/ldap/ntp/ssh/rsync/clamav) - we have about 15 samba servers in
>>production currently.
>>
>>RHEL - well - the cost is a factor
>>
>>gentoo - takes to long to deploy
>>
>>Mandrake 10?
>>
>>What are some of the samba users recommendations?
>>
>>thanks
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
I think to some degree it depends on what your implimentation of samba 
is like...As in are you doing relatively simple file sharing or are you 
making use of all the bells and whistles available (winbind, kerberos 
integration, etc.).  If you have a relatively simple configuration and 
this is in a production environment then shell out the money for RHEL or 
Suse (trying not to be too biased) and enjoy being on a relatively 
stable unchanging and *supported* OS.

If your configuration is more complex then you probably want to avoid 
those platforms as they try to update very infrequently.  Samba tends to 
be in a constant state of change and of course it has to deal with 
reacting to whatever Microsoft decides to do...for simple configurations 
this doesn't tend to matter, but if you're using some of the more 
powerful features of Samba then you probably have to look forward to 
having to upgrade on a regular basis.  In that case you should probably 
go with whatever is free and comfortable for you to use.

Christian