Harry McGregor wrote:
Dynamic DNS is a kludge, and ugly one at that. The workstation should not have control over it's hostname, that is the network's job.
The workstations name is set locally. What I mean is that when it gets an IP address from DHCP, DHCP updates DNS records with the computer's IP address.
Is it the DNS part, or the dynamic DNS part that is unstable, and what version of bind is it running.
named seems to be failing. I get complaints about journal files being out of sync and name resolution then stops entirely or works badly until I delete the journal and restart named.
It's BIND 9.2.4 as ships in Red Hat Enterprise w/ all of the updates applied.
I have run DNS servers with uptimes in the years range.
I have too. Non dynamic DNS is easy and pretty much rock solid.
Configuring bind and dhcpd should take no more than an hour, and that includes writing the zone files, and doing static addresses via dhcp for printers, etc. This is the type of thing that I do a single class lecture and lab on, and have time left over.
Again, trying to make it work the way that I did (with the DHCP server applying the updates) took a lot of time, most of which was spent on research and testing. I wrote a HOWTO for reference so it would likely only take me 30m-1h to setup from scratch now.
Again, though, this is to do something that takes less than 5 minutes with the competitive product, which does not force me to muck around in config files. :)
Samba domains work group for up to 250 nodes, and a few thousand users. Samba 3 has been very solid for us, and we are migrating systems off of a windows 2000 AD domain. We even have an interdomain trust setup between the two.
I find things like Group Policy and other benefits of AD to far outweigh what Samba offers.
We have a Microsoft Enterprise agreement. I can install Windows 2003 server on any of the servers here I want, and not have a single charge to my office. I don't trust our 5TB of storage to be managed by Windows and NTFS. I don't trust our backups to be managed by windows (we have been burned by that before). Now we run baclua, and just put in a new dual opteron to run it (sql database adds were dragging the old 800MHz Xeon down). The tape drive is a $44K changer from Qualstar.
While I have never had 5tb of storage to deal with, I have never been burnt by Windows or NTFS for things like file shares, etc. In addition, the backup software I have used has been pretty reliable. If you want some sort of enterprise level backup software then call Commvault and get a Galaxy backup pointing to a virtual tape drive on a SAN. :)
My whole point about Linux is that it's still way too hard to use and administrate. Unless, like you, you live and breathe Linux and are well skilled in it. I consider myself to be reasonably competent in Linux, yet find myself struggling often to get tasks that are simple in the Windows world done under Linux.
