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

Well cisco does it.

[j.e.hahn]

Back a few years ago there was a pretty famous article detailing how an admin at Cisco had implemented samba as the print infrastructure at all of cisco (and detailed some of the advantages and problems to it, as well as the problems inherent in the SMB protocol.)

Apparently it worked really well. You might want to try googling around for it. It's a pretty good read, but I can't remember who published it. I'm fairly certain it was one of the Linux only webzines though.

Buy new printers if...

[Dunkirk]

they don't already use Postscript. Don't leave home without it when it comes to printing with any sort of *nix.

Printing system

[dago]

Cisco has internally devlopped their printing tools and can apply to other (large) entreprise systen.

http://ceps.sourceforge.net/index.shtml

and they work great under every OS ...

Not a huge implementation, but mission-critical...

[Bravo_Two_Zero]

We have Samba running on DGUX and HP-UX boxen for moving critical data, particularly stuff destined for our old ISAM database structure. We don't do a lot of fancy stuff (only basic user-authenticated shares), but we never have downtime issues.

Not only that, but Samba runs flawlessly on the two machines that are absolutely critical to our enterprise. I'd never be able to do that with NT (apps on one, file services on the other if the apps are business-critical).

And, speaking as a fairly senior NT guy, the biggest reason for the positive uptime the the underlying OS. As long as NT is tied so tightly tied to a display subsystem, uptime will suffer. That has improved in Win2k, but an enhancement of a "broken" philosophy isn't as good as a better philosophy.

Ironically, we do use NT-based machines for general file services, though that is not considered business-critical at my company. However, we have it on our project list to move that (as well as domain control and WINS) to Samba/CIFS (CIFS is cool if you are an HP-UX shop since you can purchase commercial support from a company easily recognized by your executive-types).