[Samba] Hyldest

[Tony Earnshaw]

Means "acclaim" in both Norwegian languages (there are new official
rules out today for writing both of the 2 Indo-European Norwegian
languages).

What made me write this acclaim is the number of postings I've seen
about Samba's instability - i.e. run-away processes, profiles going
wrong, ACL problems and more.

My (high school) site with around 80 w2k workstations, of which maximum
40-50 are active all the time,  chucked out the old NT4 PDC in April/May
last and is now running RHAS3/Samba 3.0.14a compiled on the Samba server
(no-one but root has a shell login and it's firewalled) from the Samba
org's Red Hat srpm - (as well as OpenLDAP 2.2.17) on an IBM 32-bit x
series server. The uptime between a kernel update and the last reboot
was around 40 days, the present uptime is 20 days.

I'm a part-time sysadmin and work almost entirely remote, almost never
have to go to the site for Samba.

smbd processes get  neatly shut down and restarted at ws login and
logout, there are no runaway processes, people's profiles don't get
lost, MS Office works ok (though we try to encourage users to use OOo
instead), everyone can print on the network printers, Nitrobit's policy
editor works a treat (even the 1 1/2 local Windows sysadmins can
manipulate it), good AV software, everybody's happy and stays happy.

I don't know what more I can say. The whole point about taking the
decision to junk the NT4 PDC was to gain performance (we have a Gb
fiberglass backbone and 1Mb switches, so the network's adult enough),
stability and security (the cracker kids and bots played havoc with the
old  NT4 rig). Well, the decision has been justified a hundredfold.

A lot of negative stuff has been written about Red Hat Linux as a basis
for reliable enterprise operations. All I can say, after a year's
operation with 5 RHAS3 servers at this site on IBM x series hardware, is
that it's been 100% reliable and stable.

Herewith my unreserved thanks to the Samba team for their part in the
whole.

--Tonni

-- 
mail: tonye at billy.demon.nl
http://www.billy.demon.nl