[Samba] Samba "Preferred Platform"

[John H Terpstra]

On Friday 27 June 2008 23:10:55 William W. Hammond wrote:
> I have set up several OpenSuSE 10.3 File Servers...
>
> These are small environments, 5 - 15 workstations.
>
> They are purely File (and possibly Application) Servers....
>
> All are AMD64.
>
> Since the Servers only purpose in life is to support Samba.
>
> 1.)  Is there a platform Linux/Unix, where Samba is better supported...?

OpenSUSE is OK.  Red Hat Fedora or Ubuntu Server will work just as well. It's 
all a matter of how well you set things up and manage them.

> 2.)  Does Samba utilize a 64 bit environment, or is it better to
> install 32 bit for compatibility..?

Samba is 64-bit enabled.  On OpenSUSE, Red Hat Fedora, Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit OS 
installations Samba is capable of running as a full 64-bit application.

>
> A GUI is nice, I can get around in the CLI, but by no means am I
> proficient.

So long as your Samba PDC is correctly configured, user and group 
administration can be done from a MS Windows client using:

	a) The NT4 Domain User Manager
Note: Some things (like user rights and privilege management) will no longer 
work from a Windows 2000/2003/XPPro/Vista client using this old NT4 tool.

	b) The LDAP Admin tool
See: http://ldapadmin.sourceforge.net/

If you follow the implementation of Samba3-ByExample, chapter 4 or 5, you will 
be able to use the above tools to manage your Samba network.  Some things 
will need to be done from the CLI, that is life!

I hope this answers your questions/concerns.

Cheers,
John T.