On Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 05:38 AM, Dave Cross wrote:
1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause problems? How stable is Samba?
i've been using samba at my job for four years. i started using it to share a single filesystem to unix, windows, and mac clients (also had nfs and appletalk on the same box[1]). the IT people never figured out that it wasn't a windows machine, and windows users never knew any different. when the company started getting hit by nimda, the samba logs helped me track down fifty to a hundred infected machines (set the log level up to 3 and then grep the logs every hour for ntoskrnl.exe, and whoever made that request was infected -- 100% success rate on that one).
turns out, other IT peeps at my company were using samba on solaris and samba on AIX to provide what nearly everyone thought were huge NT servers... but actually, the unix machines were on a large tape backup network...
when i worked at my university, we used samba to serve the students' web directories to them via authenticated samba from a big solaris box.
samba is the strong, silent type. it always works, it's always good, people are always fixing it... but it gets none of the hype surrounding apache and linux.
of course, all this anectodal evidence doesn't help you secure a contract. instead, secure a *person* who knows samba (or is willing to learn) and dedicate that person to support of that server. do it clandestinely, experiment, get a feel for how well it performs. deploy more servers in secret. *then* ask your services guys to support samba; when they balk and claim it's not production strength, you can surprise them -- "you've been soaking in it, and we haven't had any problems!"
2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract for Samba?
dunno, i've never needed it.
3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, an NFS client for Windows?
you will be uniformly disappointed. somebody already mentioned hummingbird --- i can't say i was impressed. other options, like sftp, are nowhere near as simple and no-thought-required to use. you may wish to check whether somebody's commercial offering is really just some decorations surrounding samba.
[1] the actual task was to integrate a mac into a hard-core windows shop (former ibm peoples). i was told by some IT people that macs can't be networked (i am not making this up). others told me that the only solution was something called "dave", which either served appletalk from NT or smb from mac os9, i can't remember which, but was very expensive. the linux machine was far and away the best solution, and nobody knew any different until IT people called me up to make sure i had antivirus software up to date on my server.
