Samba Success in the Enterprise? 149
gunnk asks: "We've deployed a Samba server here to replace some aging Novell Netware boxes. It works great: fast, secure, stable. However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers. I've been searching with little success for large Samba deployments in Enterprise environments. Anyone out there care to share stories of places that are happily running large Samba installations for their file servers? Or not so happy, for that matter — better to be informed!"
Has your VIP ever heard of a little company... (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably not.
Another big company... (Score:5, Informative)
Ross
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I even think we had some SGI's running samba a few years ago...
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Maybe he should find a higher VIP just to point the case as it is, not as it seems.
Per the notice we are not talking here about "evaluating Samba as a replacement"; Samba is *already* working and working "great: fast, secure, stable", but a VIP thinks is "amateurish".
What we should say about a manager that on purpouse forgets *facts* in favour of *opinions*? Maybe it's time to restudy if the company is making a good deal paying big cash to such a person.
Not to talk about tha
Even better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Even better (Score:5, Insightful)
``That's why IBM and Google are big and profitable. Because they aren't run by you.''
It'll either get you fired or promoted. I wouldn't want to work for that asshole either- no halfway decent manager is ever going to make you waste time and money challenging heresay.
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I didn't get promoted, but last time I talked shit like that to a manager he did get fired.
You can only repeat yourself so many times before you can't hold in the fact that you think someone is a complete fucking idiot.
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Just saying "well Google uses it!" is a terrible strategy. First it makes it look as if you're out of ideas and just spouting out company names as a last resort, and secondly because saying "Google uses it!" could mean the janitors at Google use it to check of
Sure, we use it (Score:4, Informative)
We use it too...On the Enterprise (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sure, we use it (Score:5, Funny)
-with love,
your competitors.
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You get "-1, Prattler" for failing to offer an effective suggested replacement.
samba for the corporation (Score:3, Interesting)
it usually was that I did not upgrade the software often enough because *it just works*.
That in my eyes is the best feature any software package can have, that it is so reliable
you forget you have it.
As for it being 'amateur' software, amateur to me spells motivation and the quality level
of the samba software reflects that dedication quite well.
Better than the 9-5 code monkeys products by a long shot most of the time.
OSS is the future, better believe it.
Samba used by 500 developers (Score:1, Informative)
I work for a Fortune 500... we use Samba (Score:3, Interesting)
It might help (Score:5, Funny)
Paso Doble not so much. Spanish Gypsy can get quite annoying after a while.
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I 'm brazilian, and out there it is 30C (AKA 86F). No need for a warm feeling, your insensitive cloud. (But samba is welkome...)
HHS in DC. (Score:3, Informative)
Samba (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Samba (Score:4, Informative)
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It's in the military... (Score:4, Informative)
-Rick
sounds like your vp is an amateur! (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? What? (Score:2)
However, we have one VIP that feels that Samba is 'amateur' software and that we should be buying Windows servers.
Someone needs to tell your VIP to STFU and let the IT people do their jobs without him sticking his nose in. He's probably pushing it just so he can try to get some kickbacks from his friend Bob, who happens to be an MS sales rep.
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We serve about 1000 computers with it (Score:5, Informative)
For many enterprises, Samba isn't enough. They require the management aspects of ActiveDirectory. Fortunately Samba 4 will do all that. Plus I have yet to integrate Vista into our system. Promises to be a nightmare I think.
This stigma your VP has is quite common, and no amount of evidence or arguing will change his mind, likely. Stubborn ignorance. The world is slowly changing, but I think it's as the truly ignorant people die off.
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Yeah, yeah, not exactly "Enterprise" activity, but still...
Active Directory works with Samba (Score:2)
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Logically, then, the solution to improving the rate of progress has less to do with R&D investment than it does with placing more truly ignorant people at the bottom of the nearest large body of water.
I have some recommendations.
Samba is A-OK! (Score:3, Insightful)
Just ask Novell...... (Score:5, Insightful)
So at some point, this VIP probably trusted Novell. Since Novell is putting all it's effort into OES linux (which ships with Samba, not to mention employed Jeremy Allison for awhile), I bet they'd have an opinion on the subject.
It just works. (Score:5, Insightful)
I would still recommend that you use Windows, because I'm at Microsoft. We like people to use Windows. You should use Windows more often. You should install it on everything. I'd be happy to explain how you could do the same things you already do with more Windows licenses. But it's sort of your job to think about what's best for your company, not ours.
I say go with what works best for the task. (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't the software... (Score:1)
But putting it on Microsoft servers isn't a good answer either, Unix boxes have done it for years and are still good at it. If he's looking for simple and cheap, he shouldn't be looking at Microsoft, but at Apple. They have both software and hardware for cheap and large deployments and has seamless support for more than 5 protocols at the same time, with the same credentials.
And by the way
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Loving it over here (Score:3, Interesting)
The only downside is that until v4 hits the streets, we can't do full AD. We could of course get around this by dropping in a single 2k3 box to be the DC, but we'd like to avoid that if possible. I'm really looking forward to v4, as AD is one of the good things MS has done, imo (standards adherence aside)!
-Ben
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As long as Samba 4 doesn't do AD LIKE Microsoft has done it, i.e., ridiculously complicated horseshit...
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As long as Samba 4 doesn't do AD LIKE Microsoft has done it, i.e., ridiculously complicated horseshit...
Huh ? Compared to what, is AD "ridiculously complicated" ?
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Almost anything...
Just as an example, try moving AD objects using the command line tools provided.
Ridiculous.
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Just as an example, try moving AD objects using the command line tools provided.
Your problem is that you're trying to manage Windows infrastructure like you would UNIX infrastructure.
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Try moving tons of AD objects with the GUI - you'll switch to the command line - which is what those CLI tools are FOR.
And they're ridiculous - not to mention I've been told some of them don't work properly...
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If you think AD is nothing more than a shitty LDAP server/DB, you obviously don't have much of anything to do with it.
Not that it doesn't have its share of shittiness, but it's 1.) Actually a Great Idea for managing a network and 2.) Just an LDAP server like Windows is just the Registry.
Enterprise scale deployment (Score:5, Informative)
There are several different ways to connect to GSA File depending on the platform and application, but Samba is used for connecting the Windows clients, of which there are tens of thousands. In addition to general office productivity, many of these clients are doing hardware design and software development.
You can read an account of GSA File in appendix B of the Implementing NFSv4 in the Enterprise: Planning and Migration Strategies Redbook. The appendix is oriented toward the NFS aspects of the service, but you can still get a good idea of what is going on.
http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/abstracts/sg24665
Fuck him (Score:2)
Samba is used all over the place. All the FTSE 100's I've been at have used it.
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They are the standard and the largest software company in the world so their stuff has to work. If it fails it was because IT messed up.
This post has nothing to do with facts, just reality.
And not they are not the same thing.
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They are the standard and the largest software company in the world so their stuff has to work. If it fails it was because IT messed up.
Not quite -- If Microsoft's shit stinks, then IT will get blamed for it because "obviously a company like Microsoft wouldn't do anything that stupid....".
I'd just tell him: "Novell, IBM, Google, HP and Time/Warner (among others) use it is that serious enough for you?".
He'll probably call you on the Novell name-dropping, so I'd have some extra documention on what Novell is doing with Samba.
If that's not enough for him, then I'd ask (publicly, but politely) for what sort of use would satisfy him. Tell
forget him. (Score:1)
Can't be an amature if you're getting paid (Score:3, Interesting)
http://us1.samba.org/samba/support/us.html [samba.org]
Smart (Score:2)
Personal experience (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Changing hardware (including replacing drives with bigger drives).
2) Changing entire server (replacing with faster box and previous drives).
3) Power failure & UPS battery had died.
Right now it's serving files to four Windows boxes including storing video for a PVR.
Not that a home installation will mean anything to your VP.
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Quite convincing argument against an accusation of being "amateur".
Linksys network storage (NSLU2) (Score:4, Informative)
It's weird to compare a $100 box with enterprise-scale problems, but embedded software has to be 100% reliable since you can't issue patches or administer the box later if there's a problem.
(BTW the box is also linux friendly, both flashed applications and booting to a HD-based Debian system. I have one at home.)
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Novell OES (Score:1, Funny)
167 employees and growing... (Score:4, Informative)
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Samba is cool, but a NetApp is better... (Score:2, Interesting)
We support about 6500 engineers here at the rocket ranch. Back at the turn of the century, we wanted to migrate everybody from expensive-to-maintain *nix workstations to vastly cheaper Windows PCs, but we had a problem: all our data was on several dozen HP N-class data servers. We do serious 3D CAD and FEA, with engineerin
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Everyone else's "snapshot" solutions are total crap compared to NetApp's. EMC? Way more expensive, slower, more complicated for no reason, and snapshots suck (we have both EMC and NetApp.)
But yeah, they are expensive. Samba works great too, and is used by hundreds of Windows clients to access 15T of data on the EMC. The only downtime is to install security patches. Samba is WAY less expensive than EMC's NAS, and way easier to configure.
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your "VIP" is a clueless n00b (Score:5, Interesting)
I've implemented it at a number of Fortune 100 companies. I cannot name names due to NDA but you would recognize the names. I am contracting at one of them right now.
For enterprise scale use, I would even contend that Samba makes a better file server to large numbers of Windows clients than running Windows on the server. Can you run Windows on an IBM pSeries 570 (16 POWER5+ processors, 128GB RAM) to serve files to ~20,000 users? I can tell you that RHEL 4 does that just fine.
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Samba running fine here (Score:3, Insightful)
Configuring all of the proper settings on shares can be cumbersome if you have quite a few. If you require some quick and easy GUI to do everything, Swat is a favorite. Centeris also makes a product that looks promising.
Keep your eye on Samba 4. It will allow you to replace your Windows Active Directory servers. All in all, I'd have to say your VIP calling Samba amateur software shows either ignorance of reality or negative bias towards Samba.
Run the numbers for him. (Score:1)
Re:Run the numbers for him. (Score:4, Informative)
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Just like need to have and nice to have, there's need to spend and nice to spend. If you can't think of enough nice things that'll get you better educated and motivated employees, more efficient business systems or just less strain on your department without making it obvious that you have too much money, you can't be thinking very far. If you seriously have that problem, take a class with the pu
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This applies, btw, if you're a one person business, or a fortune 500. Only the size of the
another installation (Score:2)
My group in particular uses it to share files to Windows XP, 2000, 2003. The same server (Linux based) is also used for NFS for the other OSes we have. The file share is visible company-wide, since there are execs and other groups that need important files from it periodically. We generally don't have problems with it. Its current uptime is 90 days (power outage 90 days ago). The Windows servers don't even stay up for more than a couple of weeks (neve
Government (Score:2)
If you need Active Directory style functionality, take a look at Novell eDirectory and ZenWorks. There's a few ot
5 terabytes of Scientific Data @ an EDU; smbldap (Score:4, Informative)
samba and some really happy users (Score:1)
We just did a similar thing (Score:2, Interesting)
I've just finished deploying a brand new CentOS/Samba solution to replace some ageing NT4 servers.
We got a shiny new Dell Poweredge 2900 with 16GB Memory, twin quad-core Xeons and 8x300GB hot-swap SAS drives.
I configured up CentOS 4.4, using Samba/OpenLDAP/Postfix/Dovecot and MySQL to provide domain, database, roaming profile and file sharing services to a workgroup of around 100 workstations running XP.
Now we have ironed out the smaller issues with the deployment, it's absolutely rock-
Small installation (Score:2)
Samba got our full attention when we installed it on an old, slow, unused server and noticed that it was visibly much faster than any of our Windows file servers. Just clicking around the file shares in Windows Explorer, the difference was like
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[...] two main file servers (2x250gb sata raid 0 each) [...]
So what you're saying is neither of your fileservers have any important data on them ?
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Sun ships it with Solaris, and supports it (Score:3, Informative)
And they'll be happy to sell your boss as platinum support contract which includes it, so as to make it appropriaterly expensive (;-))
--dave
Part of HP-UX (Score:2, Informative)
Try Webmin (Score:1)
This is the only Linux box in our Windows based company - running phpBB2, media wiki, samba and port forwarding for remote desktop.
Does it meet the needs of our business? Yes. Configuration is not easy, but that does not mean it's amateur software.
Webmin is installed (http://www.webmin.com/) - and it allows basic configuration of Samba. Occasionally I need to use ssh to edit the config manually.
Large University Deployment Solaris + Samba (Score:3, Informative)
Other considerations (Score:4, Interesting)
Something else you might want to consider are the things Windows will do that Samba does not (or, at least, does not do without lots of hacking around).
Two of these are DFS Replication (DFSR) and Volume SnapShots (VSS).
We are currently in the process of evaluation a replacement for our aging fileserver plus some sort of centralised, SAN-like storage. Two of the leading candidates are Sun's 5320 and IBM's N5200 which offer access for clients via both network (CIFS, NFS, etc) and block-level (iSCSI, FC). Several branch offices are also in the same situation, although they lack the need for block-level, centralised disk.
However, neither of them support DFSR (nor does any other non-Windows based NAS device from what I can gather). They do both have replication technologies of their own, but those are just as expensive (additional US$8k-ish) - if not more so - than just buying a dedicated Windows fileserver to connect to the SAN/NAS device via iSCSI.
Then there's the snapshotting, which Samba doesn't do on its own (but you can hack together something, depending on the host OS). VSS in Windows is trivial to enable, very simple to use and works quite well. It's primary benefit is to reduce the overheads on support staff from users "accidentally" deleting things and needing them restored - something they are now able to do themselves, rather than weighing down support staff with those requests. It can also be used for simplifying backup procedures. (Any decent NAS device will also have some sort of snapshotting functionality).
With regards to Samba in general, we use it fairly extensively on a per-host basis to allow easy access to certain parts of the filesystem for certain staff. I've experimented with it in the past on an AD level and successfully gotten it working, but the overhead for setup is non-trivial, especially if you want things like UIDs to match up across different machines.
Simple setups in Samba and Windows are simple. More complex (Active Directory integration, especially with multiple servers) are also fairly simple in Windows, but relatively much more difficult with Samba. If you're looking at the latter - *especially if you're not already an expert* - you'll probably need almost a complete person full-time to work with it during the implementation phase.
The simple version is this: software and hardware are cheap, people-time is expensive (this is a concept a *lot* of technically oriented people - myself included - have significant difficulty a) grasping and b) remembering). In all likelihood, you will use substantially more people-time - especially in the earlier phases - with Samba than you will with Windows. That's where the "value" of Windows (or NAS appliances) comes in - saving people-time $$$. If you're already a Samba expert, OTOH, the people-time aspect of the equation will be substantially different and you can compare largely on features. However, banging out a good, manageable, sustainable, reliable AD-integrated Samba infrastructure is something that will take on the order of weeks unless you already know what you're doing and have done it before. Your boss has a very poor argument against Samba, but do not kid yourself that good arguments against Samba do not exist.
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One person salary isn't that different from the cost of the Microsoft solution (sometimes even lower) since he'll be over the machine just at instalation time. That is a really short time. (Hardware is relatively cheap, but you should take that into account too, samba runs on much cheaper hardware.)
And maintaining Samba is much cheaper than Windows. That counted on people time (as you said, that cost real $$$).
Go commercial (Score:2)
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Or maybe Bill doesn't give a shit about being compatible with anything or anybody who isn't paying him money?
Re:SAMBA + Windows 2003 Server is shit (Score:5, Interesting)
the POSIX ACL code in Samba.
I understand your problem, but you've got to realize there's
nowhere on a UNIX filesystem to store that meta-data and have
the kernel understand it.
Sure, we can push the NT ACLs into an EA, but nothing in
the kernel will look at that EA or even be able to make sense
of the SIDs stored within it.
We can do the interpretation inside Samba but this doesn't
prevent other POSIX processes from completely ignoring
whatever ACLs you thought you'd securely set on that file.
NetApp can do this as they have their own kernel (based
on FreeBSD originally) which they've hacked to understand
these ACLs. Samba isn't a kernel, and so can't do this
NFSv4 ACLs, whilst having their own problems, are much closer
to what we need to store full NT ACLs. Unfortunately they (a)
break POSIX, (b) aren't yet finished on the most popular
platorm (Linux) and (c) have no userspace API standard for
getting to them.
This is one of the reasons my world sucks (Microsoft DFS is
another at the moment
Your complaint is like a child screaming "I want a pony,
I want a pony...". We *all* want a pony. Where is it going
to live.....
Jeremy.
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telling anyone where it will live.
Samba maps Windows semantics to POSIX.
There are some semantics you simply
can't map onto POSIX - the Windows
access time / create time semantics
for example, so we simply can't
provide these. Some POSIX semantics
are flexible enough we can layer
Windows on top (locking for example).
Until the kernel gets NFSv4 ACLs
that mean NT style ACLs can be understood
there anything Samba does on top of
this will not map into anything meaningful.
There are
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biggest nfsv4 fans it's more
likely you'll see nfsv4 acls
in Solaris than Linux (in fact
I think it already has them in
Solaris 10). Now I (or someone
else) needs to write the VFS
module to plug them in.
IBM has already done this for
Samba in AIX.
Jeremy
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of a major DFS code rewrite at the moment (making
DFS work with the POSIX extensions and UNIX filename
components containing a \ character) so it might
take a while.
I'd love Sun to donate this code, just like IBM
did.....
Jeremy.
Re:What about clientserver encryption? (Score:4, Informative)
possible in CIFS - you need a secure network.
But Steve French (CIFSFS Linux client) and I
are looking at ways to add krb5/gss encryption
to Linux/MacOSX/HPUX CIFS clients when talking
to Samba servers using the UNIX extensions.
Won't work with Windows clients unless Microsoft
decides to implement what we design (and publish
the protocol in an rfc of course) but then again
you should be using Linux or Mac clients anyway to
get the extra cool features
Come to the SambaXP conference to hear more....
http://sambaxp.org/ [sambaxp.org]
Jeremy.
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Just an FYI to your
engineering product
manager. If you haven't
already I'd encourage
you to get in touch with
the Team and let us know
about your use.
For our OEMs we will usually
provide help with security
updates, advance warning of
issues etc. and also help
debugging complex problems.
Cheers,
Jeremy.