[Samba] Migrating, Upgrading & Testing Samba 4 PDC/BDC

[James B. Byrne]

On Thu, September 29, 2016 09:57, Charish Patel wrote:
> If you mean regular Microsoft AD, the reason is simple: cost.
> Management sadly does not want to shell out the money for it.
>

We went to Samba for the simple reason that we could not figure out
how much the licensing costs would be to upgrade our ancient W2KAS
domain controller.

Back in the day Microsoft shipped access licences with every copy of
WinXPpro.  They also did not count a DHCP assignment to a network
device or DNS lookup from one as needing a license.

None of this, according to the information we were provided by a MS
'partner' when we investigated this, is the case any longer.  Not to
mention we informed that we needed to licence every core; and that
additional licences were required if, god forbid, direct access from
the internet was intended.

In the end we gave up even trying to figure out a configuration that
would minimise our expense on equipment that would suit our needs. 
There was just too much administrative effort required to get the cost
pinned down to something manageable.  Then we had to look at the
ongoing costs of compliance.  For large corporations that have the
money to bleed into MS and have the staff to jump through their
compliance hoops, and who no doubt enjoy a deep corporate discount, it
is a game that they can afford.  We just shook our heads in disbelief
and walked away.


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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
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