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Samba Success in the Enterprise?
gunnk asks: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in Enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"
called Google?
Probably not.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
AOL/Time-Warner enormously relies on linux and Samba all over the place. This may or may not help your case depending on what your boss thinks of AOL as a company...
Ross
I can imagine samba making the workplace feel a little more-upbeat, what with the 1..a-2..3..a-4 rhythm that makes you want to shake that booty. It can definitely keep folks awake at their workstations, which would boost productivity. Plus it would give everything a more Brazilian feel, which will help people forget that in fact outside it's all icy and cold. So, yes, I could definitely see samba being successful in enterprise.
Paso Doble not so much. Spanish Gypsy can get quite annoying after a while.
I like basketball!!1!
sounds like your vp is an amateur and should be replaced with 'anyone' else!
I have several samba servers that serve 3000 users and almost 1000 computers, from Windows 98 to XP. It works well and only ever gives us problems when LDAP (OpenLDAP is tempermental) has a problem. We've used Samba since the 2.2 days in production. We're looking forward to Samba 4 to get ActiveDirectory-style domains. NT domains work fine, but are clunky. Only our lab machines are on a domain. The rest of the machines either just have local accounts with network drives mapped, or have pGina logins that map the drives for the user.
For many enterprises, Samba isn't enough. They require the management aspects of ActiveDirectory. Fortunately Samba 4 will do all that. Plus I have yet to integrate Vista into our system. Promises to be a nightmare I think.
This stigma your VP has is quite common, and no amount of evidence or arguing will change his mind, likely. Stubborn ignorance. The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes
So at some point, this VIP probably trusted Novell. Since Novell is putting all it's effort into OES linux (which ships with Samba, not to mention employed Jeremy Allison for awhile), I bet they'd have an opinion on the subject.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Samba is every bit as good as anything else for running a file server, and if you're setting your file servers up correctly, nobody will know or care what they're running. They either work or they don't.
I would still recommend that you use Windows, because I'm at Microsoft. We like people to use Windows. You should use Windows more often. You should install it on everything. I'd be happy to explain how you could do the same things you already do with more Windows licenses. But it's sort of your job to think about what's best for your company, not ours.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
I hear they use it on the Excelsior as well. It's a great little secret weapon, let's hope the Klingons don't get it.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
We have a project inside IBM called the Global Storage Architecture that provides enterprise file system service. There are currently over 95K users on GSA with over 143TB of used space, spread across 39 installations on 5 continents.
7 .html
There are several different ways to connect to GSA File depending on the platform and application, but Samba is used for connecting the Windows clients, of which there are tens of thousands. In addition to general office productivity, many of these clients are doing hardware design and software development.
You can read an account of GSA File in appendix B of the Implementing NFSv4 in the Enterprise: Planning and Migration Strategies Redbook. The appendix is oriented toward the NFS aspects of the service, but you can still get a good idea of what is going on.
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/abstracts/sg24665
-with love,
your competitors.
Samba may have been met with trepidation like 8 years ago. The rest of the world has gotten with the program. It works. It works well. It works extremely well.
I've implemented it at a number of Fortune 100 companies. I cannot name names due to NDA but you would recognize the names. I am contracting at one of them right now.
For enterprise scale use, I would even contend that Samba makes a better file server to large numbers of Windows clients than running Windows on the server. Can you run Windows on an IBM pSeries 570 (16 POWER5+ processors, 128GB RAM) to serve files to ~20,000 users? I can tell you that RHEL 4 does that just fine.
Instead of quoting specific companies, how about pointing to that well known study which shows that Samba is more than twice as fast as Windows Server 2003 for SMB serving?
It's me you're complaining about here, as I wrote (and maintain)
:-).
:-) :-).
:-).
the POSIX ACL code in Samba.
I understand your problem, but you've got to realize there's
nowhere on a UNIX filesystem to store that meta-data and have
the kernel understand it.
Sure, we can push the NT ACLs into an EA, but nothing in
the kernel will look at that EA or even be able to make sense
of the SIDs stored within it.
We can do the interpretation inside Samba but this doesn't
prevent other POSIX processes from completely ignoring
whatever ACLs you thought you'd securely set on that file.
NetApp can do this as they have their own kernel (based
on FreeBSD originally) which they've hacked to understand
these ACLs. Samba isn't a kernel, and so can't do this
NFSv4 ACLs, whilst having their own problems, are much closer
to what we need to store full NT ACLs. Unfortunately they (a)
break POSIX, (b) aren't yet finished on the most popular
platorm (Linux) and (c) have no userspace API standard for
getting to them.
This is one of the reasons my world sucks (Microsoft DFS is
another at the moment
Your complaint is like a child screaming "I want a pony,
I want a pony...". We *all* want a pony. Where is it going
to live.....
Jeremy.