Want to replace NT PDC !! 1

[hannahsh]

We have not used any UNIX box's as yet, however with Microsoft licensing going mad, we could save £100,000 if we move some servers to Unix.

My question is, can we replace our NT PDC with UNIX and would it offer similar functionality - full platform authentication, policies etc. We also have Citrix servers and I think similar is as yet unavailable for UNIX.

Has anyone tried this yet and what problems did you encounter, saving us a load of time - we dont have.

I am not expecting to be able to migrate from NT as I guess no one have made any tools for this function !!??XX

CHeers

I guess this will be a common topic over the next few months and years !!

 

[solarisman]

I am not a big fan of Microsoft, but I think a PDC is easier
to manage in an NT environment, expecially DNS. We have both
in unix and windows, but of course windows is just point and
click. We use Microsoft for our PDC and primary dns. Our
secondary dns is unix based. Just giving advice, but it is
totally up to you...

 

[hannahsh]

I am not interested with the adminsitration side, its going to be down to simple costs. When every single connection requires a user license, even with only 300 users our costs are increasing at an alarming rate.

With Mandrake costing us £1,200 inclusive then it will save us £20,000 per year at depreciation rates. Upfront,it would give me a saving of £80,000 !!

I guess I am being adventurous, but I believe many will be considering this option in the near future - even if just for file and print, e-mail and their websites. I just wondered what else is practical and how successfull people have managed to implement it !!

 

[ady2k]

Great Ide.You can use samba for linux/Sun Solaris.The samba server can replace NT PDC.
All users can use unix user for authentication.You still can use windows 95/98 as client.You can use linux server for saving cost.

 

[jad]

Samba can be a PDC but it needs some setting up ... you need to store the passwords in their encrypted form on the samba server (although there is a way of grabbing these of the current PDC) and they are different from the unix user passwords in how they are stored ... but i've played with it and they work.

there is a down side ... we have some old win95 machines (and some win3.1 machines) that don't use encrypted passwords, so to make the system work we have samba with encrypted passwords off, this means that you don't automatically connect to each share, and have to type in your password again ... can be annoying. newer win95 (2nd edition at least) has encryption turned on, so all of those machines would work fine.

we have no NT PDC at our site, it caused problems, since we work on Solaris machines and NT didn't want to interact properly with them, however we have found that for machine uptime, reliability, scalability plus maintenance and backup our unix machines are better to use than windows machines.

we can bring back our server boxes in less than 2 hours, we gave up on our development NT box and reinstalled from scratch.

 

[solarisman]

I agree with JAD in that your uptime and scalability is better, but we have been running have 3 different flavors
of unix running and over 65 unix servers at my data center
and our PDC and DNS is just fine on NT.

JAD may need to hire some NT people who know what they are
doing. I am not an advocate of Microsoft, but just trying
to tell you what does work.....

 

[jad]

we don't use NT now ... well not for anything important ...

we had it and tested it, but all our business critical applications are Unix ...

the NT box had a dead hard drive, which is a new device ... and NT couldn't restore properly onto it, all the links were wrong.

we have 6 linux 386/486 boxes as printer servers, 2 sparc classics, 2 sparc ultra 5's and a few powerful intel solaris machines ... most desktops are being converted to Solaris, because we finally bit the bullet and nisplus'ed everything, which is a pain to set up, but infinately better to control. any PC clients are being DHCP'd from one of the Solaris servers, the mail and firewall are unix based, running ipfilter, sendmail, delegate and squid (+ a few other useful proxies)

NT gets in the way really

 

[hannahsh]

But my arguement for changing to UNIX was cost only

I have previously worked with medium Sun clusters 3500 etc and to be honest Compaq/NT blew them away for reliability. The SUn box's were crap and for ever breaking down - memory and HDD !! The compaqs bar one raid controller was dullet proof.

However, the cost of the new microsoft licenses makes UNIX a must for small and I suppose all companies but we are small and dont have the cash to give to Microsoft just for basic server services - web, e-mail etc thats all !!

Every connection is chargeable and they are getting very heavy on the phone enquiries lately - I have had enough of that too !!

 

[jad]

in that case a good dell/compaq server running either linux, or solaris seems probably your best bet ... intel architecture machines are a lot cheaper ... and you can replace the things quickly ... i have a preference for solaris, but dell support linux, and i have a feeling that compaq do too ...

compared to the cost of Microsoft licenses though, all hardware is cheap.

P.S. if you go for dells go for the servers, not for the workstations, the servers are better build quality, and more stable.

 

[hannahsh]

servers v workstations

I had no intentions to even consider usinf a workstation, servers are a must as I want to use raid for resilience.

I have always liked Compaq, especially with Insight Manager and their new low priced "light out" diagnostic boards. I guess we will have some fun trying samba, I am in the process of setting a test lab up with 2 servers - UNIX, NT and 3 clients (XP, 2000 PRO and win98) I just need a switch from eBay !!

I will document the complete lab test so anyone wanting to compare or use our finding can have them !! But I also predict a steady stream of questions for you all too !!

 

[williambishop]

Outside of my main job(which uses a lot of novell and NT) most of my contracts use unix and I just can't imagine where one would have better durability from compaqs....I still have a sparc20 that is near 100% utilization and has been for the last couple of years, and the big sun iron I've worked with has with the exception of one box, been faultless. I have seen sun boxes with uptimes measured in years...Whereas my experience with pc server hardware has been less than optimal. Outside of this disparity in our experiences, I think the advice to go with linux pushing samba will be the money winner. There is no cost at all. It runs on cheap pc hardware...which while not as dependable in my experience, is much easier to replace on the wallet. And if you are running any windows 3.1 or 95a or b, you really need to upgrade anyway.

 

[sajeshsingh01]

You may want to look at PC Netlink. Its a free download from sun.

http://www.sun.com/solutions/interoperability/netlink/download.html?redirect=false