[ale] Switching from Server 2003 to Samba

[Edward Holcroft]

All,

The time has finally come to ditch our Micro$haft file servers as another
increment towards weaning ourselves of our Windows habit. For now, I have
to keep Active Directory in the picture, although I have managed to reduce
the AD server footprint from 18 servers down to 4. Corporate mindset issues
demand small steps.

Question: Is it better to go with an "appliance solution" such as FreeNAS
vs. distro+Samba?

I played around with FreeNAS a bit and while it has great automation of
things like AD integration (which I will need to do for now) and a great
web interface, it seems less flexible when it comes to e.g. backup options.
It seems a simple Ubuntu/Samba box gives me many options on how to handle
our daily backups to USB, while FreeNAS can potentially close doors to me,
or at least make things harder. That's just one example that I ran into.

So, I'd like to hear from you about experiences/pros-cons of appliance-type
options vs the manual way. I've tried both at a simple test level. They
both seem viable and I really want to like FreeNAS, but just cannot seem to
get comfortable with it - little glitches seem to pop up that have the
potential to be major sticking points. So right now I'm leaning towards
distro+Samba.

Feel free to suggest other options besides the two mentioned here. Whatever
solution I deploy I have to be able to use Windows ACL's on the shares ...
for now.

cheers
ed

-- 
Edward Holcroft | Madsen Kneppers & Associates Inc.
11695 Johns Creek Parkway, Suite 250 | Johns Creek, GA 30097
O (770) 446-9606 | M (770) 630-0949

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