[ale] Switching from Server 2003 to Samba

[Jeff Hubbs]

On 7/10/14, 3:53 PM, Edward Holcroft wrote:
> 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?
Distro+Samba.  A big tree of directories and files is not something you 
want to only be able to manipulate from the outside.

At a Previous Employer I talked them into getting away from a $40K 
IBM-rebadged NetApp unit for $25K worth of Supermicro servers, drives, 
and spare parts (no waiting for clueless contract maintenance guy to 
find the office and bring the wrong part - grab a screwdriver and FIX IT 
NOW!).  Not only could I configure the drives and controllers as I liked 
(nice fast SAS drives with RAID1 pairs split across controllers that 
were then RAID0ed plus eight 1TB drives in another RAID0+1 arrangement 
as a holding area), but the server itself could perform Herculean 
tasks.  When it ran clamav on the shares, it would do so on eight cores 
and while reading from the SAS array at about 200MiB/s.  And every so 
often, someone would make an errant mouse drag and have no idea where 
they just moved their life's work; searching the shares for files within 
the server itself was quick and easy.  I couldn't imagine life with many 
TiB trapped inside a device with only a tiny Ethernet pinhole through 
which to read or write files.  With the old IBM NAS, you had to pay 
thousands just to have a protocol (e.g. NFS) enabled, and whereas you 
could actually telnet into it (ew!), once you were at a shell you 
couldn't actually do much of anything.

I had this machine and its "warm spare" (running off its internal SSDs 
and two 80GB drives in the front - both running Gentoo Linux) networked 
to a Gentoo-running Sun that had a tape library connected to it.

Even FreeNAS seems like it paints people into too much of a corner. 
Linux and the daemon(s) of choice is the only way I'd ever run.