[ale] Switching from Server 2003 to Samba

[JD]

Why not try both in parallel to see which fits better?
Lots of companies love FreeNAS and while it doesn't fit my needs, I don't want
to rule it out for others. Especially if the storage is for servers only, no
desktops.

Also, if you believe there is any chance of dumping MS-AD in the future, then
going with RHEL or CentOS (instead of Ubuntu/Debian) would make sense for the
FreeIPA aspect.



On 07/10/2014 03:53 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?
> 
> 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
>