[Samba] Hardware decisions

[jolly eissucht]

Thank you very much for your emails! This helps a lot. There's a lot
information about samba and debian to find via uncle google but when it
comes to generell ideas about planning and structure and you have to
figure it out all alone there's no too much to find via internet....

>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)?

there's no current purpose. We had an old Windows 2003 Server on the
weakest machine I mentioned before. But the hard disk broke down and now
it's unusable. It was a question of time...

For windows automatic task-planned backup I had just an external hard
disk. The windows 2003 server had no profiles, no home directories, just
some shares (all in all about 10GB) and the logins of course. This is
quite embarassing, I know but now as Windows 2003 Server broke down I
finally get help in the form of another employee for a month who takes
over day-to-day business so that I can finally focus on some really good
server solution.. no time before...

and the "newer" servers I mentioned before were also bought before my
time... so, as it seems now, they are quite too strong
(over-dimensioned) for my purposes....

I have a NAS storage with 4 drives so I consider putting the backup on
this one... like the one in the picture:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Attached_Storage ... it has 4
drives with 500GB each... I consider RAID 1... but how can I configure
that in my samba 4/debian jessie environment? can you recommend
interfaces to configure the NAS? I have no experience with NAS. Can I
put debian jessie on a NAS?

thank you again!
jolly



Am 2015-08-02 um 14:12 schrieb 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. 
>
> ---
>
> _______________________________ 
>
> 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:
> ------
> [1] https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/User_Documentation
> [2] http://www.donelsontrophy.com