Samba

[WhiteElephant]

I am wanting to setup an office network consisting of three computers and one server. We already have the equipment ready with Vista Business pre-installed on the computers. I want to be able to create a network which allows users to use any machine as this will reduce downtime should a machine break. Also I would like user's files to be held centrally on the server which makes backups easier.

The most important element here is data backup. As like most businesses we are moving away from paper and using the computers to store important records such as customer information. If this data were to be lost, the business would come to a complete halt.

I have been looking at the idea of installing a Microsoft Small Business Server as it would be nice to have centralised control of the machines. However the cost would be over £800 which can not be justified for three machines and five users. Therefore I am turning to Linux for a alternative solution. I have previously used CentOS and Ubuntu for home use but never really gained much knowledge or experience of either.

It is my understanding that Samba can act as a Primary Domain Controller, which if I'm not mistaken is where it handles the network logins and profiles. Is this correct?

I have come across many samba tutorials online but whats confusing is they are all different. Some of the tutorials involve using Kerberos and OpenLDAP. Do I need to learn about either of these? What do they do and what benefit will they bring?

Finally, I see Samba 4 is in development and is likely to bring a lot of new features which aren't available in Samba 3. Is this worth waiting for because I don't want to be upgrading everything again 6 months down the road?

Thanks for your support.

[HermanAB]

Howdy,

Yes you can use Samba, but you could save yourself a heckofalot of trouble by installing Windows Services for UNIX (free download from MS) on the Windows machines and then use a NFS server instead of Samba.

A NFS server has one, yes *one* line of configuration in one file. Samba has hundreds of lines of configuration and the book is 2 inches thick. You do the math.

[dtech]

I would not wait for samba 4. It is still under development and even when it is released I'd wait at least a year before using it in a production environment.

Samba can indeed act as a domain controller, OpenLDAP is the equivalent of Active-Directory (keeping information about your computers and/or users) and Kerberos provides authentication.

The suggestion from HermanAB isn't a bad one, but with NFS you will only be able to set up file shares for files/backups. You cannot store complete profiles as e.g. Samba can. You can even provide both to the same shares (because NFS is usually faster). But personally I'd view samba as neccesairy and NFS as supplementary.

As for your backups: I'd suggest a RAID-1 configuration for / and /home (seperate partitions). This is easy using linux software-raid. For backups you can use an external HD or extra internal HD.

[WhiteElephant]

Thanks for the advice up there.

The server has two 500gb drives but does not have a raid controller. I already have a backup script which will copy /home into /backup every week, and it will keep the last six weeks worth backups. Therefore I was thinking about having one whole drive just for /backup and leave the primary drive for /.

I will have a look into the NFS and the Windows Services for Unix. Im not exactly sure what the OpenLDAP does or even if I need it but Ill try to find "OpenLDAP for Dummies".

[R.Bucky]

If you have the option, install Ubuntu Server with soft RAID and a hot spare and then use an external backup. Call it extra insurance, but RAID is a much happier circumstance, especially for a business.

[WhiteElephant]

I have been having a think about the setup. If the server goes down then all the network will be offline for a few days until someone comes to repair it. Given that we only have a few computers and users would it be better to have these setup as stand-alone machines? Then I can use Samba or NFS for setting up some shared storage. Then the computers could be setup to backup weekly onto the server.

What would you recommend?

[dtech]

A (linux) server is quite stable once setup, only kernel-upgrades and distribution upgrades can cause serious problems. In my experience hardware failure, especially hard disk failure, is a much greater concern. As such, I would really advise software-raid-1.

[WhiteElephant]

I think I will setup Samba as a Primary Domain Controller to handle network logins & roaming profiles.

I have also looked into DropBox and its highly likely that I will be going down this route. I will share the /home/user's folder with the individual users so they can gain access to their files from home.

I will install Avast for Linux which I can setup on a cron job to do a daily scan on the /home/ directory.

The backup script I have would run weekly and copy the /home/ directory into /backup/, which is on a secondary drive. This script is also set to keep the last six previous backups just incase something is deleted or becomes corrupt. However if I use the software RAID 1 as you have suggested then there would be no need to use this script. What would happen if all the files on drive one became deleted, damaged or corrupt, wouldn't this means the backups files are also affected?

[dtech]

I don't see how all files on the primary drive would become corrupt at once. The only likely cause for this would be a RAID-0 setup in which one of the drives fails. Or a stolen root password and a malicious "hacker". In any case, I wouldn't worry about it.

[WhiteElephant]

Lets suppose a user edits a file or deletes it, that would also affect the backup. I think my idea of copying A to B once a week would be a better solution.

In regards to setting up a proxy server to filter bad content, I am thinking of using Squid with filters from URLBlacklist.com. There is also DansGuardian, SquidGuard. What would you recommend?