[LUNI] Samba?

[Mark Stuart Burge]

> I've got an old box sitting at home, Pentium, 128M RAM, 20G hard
> drive.  Think that would cut it?
>   
Years ago I had samba running very fast on a PII 233 with 128MB PC100 
SDRAM, so technically, it would work, but I have found in practice, that 
using old hardware can cause more headaches long term and leave you back 
at square one, as a failed attempt at this point would make it harder to 
move forward in the future.

Can you trust the power supply, processor fan, hard drive, memory 
graphics card not to fail after running 24x7x365 ?
If it does fail, then where do you stand as far as being responsible for 
the repair / replacement and subsequent loss ?

At this stage, if they are willing to purchase one machine, find a way 
to convince them of the overwhelming frugality of purchasing two or more 
identical computers and how linking them both to a network storage 
device would provide for ease of maintenance, backups and future growth.

If you do go with the samba server, use the new pc to back up the entire 
share to it's own hard drive on a regular basis, so in the event of 
failure, you can just enable the backed up folder as a share and do peer 
to peer across the network.

Trying to maintain a network with an XP machine up against a Win9x 
machine would probably transfer the constant use of one machine over to 
the xp machine, cos let's face it, who would want to use the 98SE box 
once they get used to the speed and candy of the xp  box.

If they are looking at a purchase of $700 plus for the new machine, then 
you could convince them to go with a couple of Dells at approx $500 each 
with nice shiny 19" flat screens included in the price and they would be 
spending just $300 more !

The time saved in administering two new computers over fighting with 
98SE would pay for itself over and over.


> I know almost nothing about Windows and even less about Samba.  How
> tricky is this gonna be?...
>
>   
Depends on the distro, but a generic samba installation would at least 
require you to manage username / passwords for each user on each machine 
and also learn some of the config file.  Setting folder permissions and 
setting up a recycle bin. 


> These are people who pass USB cables back and forth instead of
> plugging their brand-new printers into the network hub that's a foot
> away, just to give you an idea of the environment we are dealing with
> here... :-)
>
> I'll network the printers while I'm at it.
>
> Am I even on the right track here?
>
> If OpenOffice had a Publish replacement, I'd just get them a couple
> Linux boxes...
>
>   
One avenue for converting to Openoffice where publisher is already in 
use, is to gradually convert each document into html or powerpoint (most 
people use publisher for single page documents simply because they find 
it easier than learning about layering objects)  Publisher will export 
to html which can then be edited in openoffice directly (although you 
will need to fix a few formatting errors) or you can copy and paste each 
frame and picture manually into  presenter, writer or draw depending on 
the type of document it is.

Multi Page documents are a bit of a bind (excuse the pun) in Linux so 
far, but you might be interested in 'scribus' which is a simple dtp 
application.

Like you, I could really do with an OO publisher for some of my clients.