David, I'd certainly suggest upgrading the file servers and making them DC's. The cost should be far less than an additional 2 servers. Using a workgroup is a short term measure and any company growing at a reasonable rate (10 new users at once) surely would benefit from a bit of forward planning to get a scalable IT infrastructure. What makes you think your existing servers are running at capacity? CPU? Memory? Disks?
Darren. -----Original Message----- From: David Bradford [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 11 July 2002 14:19 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [ActiveDir] Why Active Directory? Hi all; For the last 2 months I've been given the additional job of "part time" network admin for my company's network. Its currently 80 workstations, 2 windows 2000 servers and about 10 HP printers. The workstations run either Win98/WinMe/Win2k Professional or WinXP Home/Pro. Its all running in workgroup mode and it's a pain in the butt to maintain user accounts/passwords etc etc. 10 New users joined us today and they needed access to both win2k servers and various printers connected to various workstations, so off I went adding the same 10 users to all the different machines. Additionally, Winme and XP home sometimes can, sometimes cant see the network. A reboot almost always cures the problem. Very annoying. Of course, keeping track of service packs/patches - even deploying normal apps is a monumental task. I can see why the previous network admin left! Basically, the network is becoming unmanageable. I'm familiar with AD and its obvious to me that a proper directory service will do wonders for the network but management seem to think everything is running OK at present so why would they want to buy 2 more servers to act as domain controllers and upgrade everyone to either win2k or WinXP pro? The existing win2k servers are used as our fileservers and are pretty busy so upgrading them to DC's wouldn't be desirable. Basically, I need some reasons that I can present to management why AD will be such a great thing for us, I've suggested user management/deploying apps as advantages but they don't seem impressed. What else can I add? Thanks; David Bradford List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/ List info : http://www.activedir.org/mail_list.htm List FAQ : http://www.activedir.org/list_faq.htm List archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/activedir%40mail.activedir.org/
