[Samba] Hardware decisions

[Bob of Donelson Trophy]

I have a very small Samba4 system that supports my W7 clients. So small,
in fact, that I have only one DC (right now.) My DC is a 32-bit Pentium4
processor (512Mb RAM, 60Gb hdd), small form factor case, I got lucky and
found for cheap$$. My member server is a Intel DuoCore PC with RAID 1
(mdadm) hard drives mirrored running on Debian 7.8.0. And my backup
machine is a seperate (does only backup) QuadCore, 2Gb RAM, with OS on
60Gb hdd and two 1Tb hdd's that store the data. All these connected to a
1 Gb LAN. 

If "I" were supporting 50 W7 clients then "I" might seriously consider
two DC's. In the unlikely event that a system loose it's single DC, the
W7 clients are virtually useless without the Samba4 backend. I don't
think you want your office workers staring at you while you restore your
lone DC. 

Bottom line . . . you probably should consider four separate machines, 2
DC's, 1 member, and 1 backup. (Backups . . . need to get an image off
site in the event of a catastrophic disaster . . . tornado, flood, fire,
etc. . . but you have probably thought about this already.) 

(I have noticed recently, online, off-lease Dells, Lenovo's, HP's, and
others small form factor CoreDuo processor PC's for less than $100usd.
Ad's mention 32-bit software but when you look up the processor spec
details they are 64-bit processors running 32-bit software . . . these
are good deals!! I cannot remember if Debian 8 is 64-bit only but,
CentOS 7 is 64-bit only, now requiring minimum 512 Mb RAM to install. I
know that for a fact.) 

There are a lot of alternative variations your system can evolve into.
Mine is just one **example**. Others may have a different ideas . . .
good luck. 

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_______________________________ 

Bob Wooden of Donelson Trophy

615.885.2846
www.donelsontrophy.com [2]

"Everyone deserves an award!!"

On 2015-08-01 13:01, Marc Muehlfeld wrote: 

> Hello Jolly,
> 
> Am 01.08.2015 um 19:09 schrieb jolly eissucht:
> 
>> ... samba 4 primary dc and recommended secondary dc
> 
> There are no primary, secondary, etc. in an AD - just DCs.
> 
>> I got the following hardware: 2 server PCs with the following configuration - they are exactly the same Hardware: 4 disk drives with 1000gb each (sata), at the moment confugured in raid 1, 4gb Ram, about 6 years old 1 server PC with 1 disk drive with 100gb (still ide), 1gb Ram, about 10 years old network is max. 100mbit/s... Where would you install primary dc, secondary dc and file server? Where the backup?
> 
> If I count this right, this are 3 servers for 4 purposes (2 DCs, 1
> fileserver, 1 backupserver). You should not put your backups on one of
> these 3 servers. What if this one gets lost? If it should be really
> cheap, put it at least on some external media. For a production
> environment you should use an additional host.
> 
> Don't expect much CPU usage/IO/network traffic on the DCs. Your network
> is quite small, so I'm sure the 1 GB machine is fine for that. However
> you should think about putting everything on RAID.
> 
> For the fileserver it depents on your needs. Usually you don't require
> much RAM in that machines. CPU usage is mostly also low in networks not
> transfering all the time hundreds of GB to the host.
> 
> Maybe a good questions is: What is the current purpose of this hosts. Or
> what hardware are you currently using for the file-/backup server and
> for the host controlling your domain (if you have one)?
> 
>> Also I' m able to configure samba 4 on debian wheezy. If there are special things to consider on debian jessie and you know tutorials I'm happy about links.... do you use sernet packages samba 4 on debian jessie or just samba 4 that comes with Debian jessie?
> 
> I don't know if there's something special about Debian, beside the
> package names you have to pre-install, but a good place to start with
> documentation in gerneral is:
> https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/User_Documentation [1]
> 
> Regards,
> Marc
 

Links:
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[1] https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/User_Documentation
[2] http://www.donelsontrophy.com