by So we’ve had this extremely busy summer. Last summer our new Dean laid down the law and told every department in our college to start working together and come up with a unified IT environment by the start of Fall semester ’06. We spent about 8 months just getting everyone to agree on what authentication, file storage, e-mail, printing, backup, web CMS, mail system, and help desk solutions to standardize on.
One of my main tasks was to implement a common file storage solution. Now this was not easy, since we have 8 departments plus the Dean’s office and there were 9 different ways of storing files. But we knew we wanted the same basic methodology in place everywhere and it had to be consistent for both Windows and UNIX/Linux. Our group already had lots of experience with Samba and NFS running on Linux servers so that’s what we decided to go with.
Naturally, the Windows admins were nervous:
“We don’t know anything about Linux, how are we gonna be able to troubleshoot problems with it?”
“We have over 2TB of data on Windows file servers. How are we gonna transfer that to Linux?”
“Samba won’t know how to handle Windows ACLs. Permissions will get all screwed up.”
“Samba won’t work with Windows correctly. We’re gonna have tons of problems.”
Ok. This was gonna be a hard group to convince. But we forged ahead. We got budget to buy all new big, fast servers. Installed RHEL4 and Samba. Moved all of the data off of the Windows file servers to the Linux servers. Integrated everything with the Windows 2003 domain and our central (Hesiod!) usernames, and set the homeDirectory attributes for every user to point to the correct Samba servers.
Now we have 6500 user home directories served by Samba and NFS to roughly 900 Windows, 150 Linux, and 50 Solaris clients. And, so far at least, things are running pretty smoothly. ACLs work great over both SMB and NFS. XFS quotas on Linux are great. Moving home directories is a breeze. Security is better than ever. And the Windows admins are starting to believe in Samba.
Earlier this week, those same admins were in a world of hurt. They had set up a Windows machine to serve installation images for building the Windows clients (don’t ask me the details. Installing Windows over a network is a big mystery to me). But then catastrophe struck, something about Windows and the Intel Pro 1000 NIC don’t play nice and this big new Windows server was essentially useless for installing their clients. Here comes Samba to the rescue! It turns out that Samba works great for serving Windows installation images. Plus it’s a heckuva lot easier to custom configure than a Windows server.
And finally, our Windows admins are starting to realize that you can’t succeed in a monolithic IT culture. see ya