Large Scale Deployment of Linux for File/Print Services?

sgtrock asks: "I was approached this week by a manager of the server support group at my company. He says he and his boss are trying to figure out what should host our file and print services for the company (read, replace Netware). He asked me if I thought if it would be feasible to do on Linux servers. Now, I was more than pleasantly surprised by the question, because as late as last fall I couldn't get this guy to take Linux seriously for companies our size. However, recent stories about Microsoft plus some of their actions here have really soured him on the idea of moving to Win2k services where he doesn't have to. I told him that in theory we could do it: LDAP authentication to our existing NDS on the back end, Samba file service and either LPR/LPD or CUPS based printing. The big open question mark for me is archiving. He then asked me if I knew of anyone already doing it." I'm sure there are shops out there that are using Linux as such. If you are, please raise your hand! Numbers on the size of the network and how well the system has been holding up would be appreciated.

"This is a pretty conservative company. We HATE to be first if we can avoid it. Every time we are we pay in much pain and sweat. So, I'd like to know the following: Does anyone know of or can point to success stories for this kind of application in very large environments? Mind you, I'm talking about tens of thousands of desktops, as we have 60,000 users. University stories will be looked at with skepticism by this management team. I'll read the stories, but they probably won't be given much credence by anyone else. Thanks for your time."

Comments

And the business justification for replacing Net..

[sphealey]

And the business justification for replacing Netware is...? Particularly on the printing side, if the system is used by non-technical people? I have rarely seen a solid (read "cost justified") business case for replacing Netware in a large corporate environment. Usually it boils down to "we want to go Microsoft", and since that's not an issue for you, why are you doing this?

sPh

Cisco

[afidel]

Cisco's Enterprise Printing System (CEPS) runs off samba and lprng. The windows clients just enter \\servername, then double click on the printer they wish to set up. The samba server sends them the drivers appropriate for the model of the printer and the client's OS, and sets it's config to use the samba server as the print queue. We also have a web interface for stopping the queue, restarting it, checking the printers status etc.