[Samba] Help: justification for Linux PDC vs Windows...

JJB onephatcat at earthlink.net
Fri Apr 11 17:38:19 GMT 2008


Yan Seiner wrote:
> Greg J. Zartman, P.E.
>
>  
>> Fact is, most of us don't have farms of domain controllers and hundreds
>>     
> and hundreds of users.  Most of us manage small to medium sized networks
> that can benefit hugely by the cost savings of deploying Samba instead
> of Windows.  I'm not talking about just costs of software licenses; but
> cost of hardware, sys admin staff, and down time.
>
> Yup.  For small-ish networks, nt4 servers are 'good enough'.
>
> Last I checked, MS imposes an artificial limit on its servers, where a
> server can only serve its own subnet.  Samba doesn't have this limit.  So
> a single multi-homed samba server can do the work of several MS servers.
>
> So you don't need AD with samba as much since everything is on one server
> anyway whereas with MS you need multiple servers and all the management
> overhead that entails.
>
> I could be wrong on this; it was true the last time I ripped out a bunch
> of MS servers and replaced them with samba.  This was some time 
> ago.... Anyone know if it's still a limitation?
>
>   

As I understand it, you need a WINS server for every subnet - we figured 
this out after the fact, so we now have 3 servers running Samba so that 
everyone can see all members of the workgroup (we are rolling out the 
domain slowly - in the meanwhile, we don't want to lose browse 
functionality). If anyone has a written proceedure for how to get this 
working with only one multi-homed server (does that mean one server with 
1 network card for each subnet, or one card with 3 addresses somehow 
associated with it?) please post a link or email it to me.

Thanks

- Joel



More information about the samba mailing list