I used samba on an old 486 with 16mb of ram for a school lab with 12 win95 desktops. It was all they had for hardware so I installed redhat linux 6.1 with only the bare essionsials. Since I was using an old 2gb scsi drive I dedicated 1.5gb for there files. It still is running as far as I know. Although it is lightly used.
As for backups I would use a combination of several open source products. Get a CDR for your server, a low end tape drive, and download these packages.
http://mkcdrec.sourceforge.net/ This will allow you to make an iso image of your server for quick recovery. You should only need to do this once to get a base image. Exclude your client backup data.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ This will allow you to backup the Win9x/3.11 clients and your servers data to the local harddrive.
Use taper (Comes on Redhat cd's) from the command line to do backups of your system data. I've attached a script of what I use. If your really cheap then you could still use the cdr for backups. You could use cdrecord to just dump the files onto the cd as is. If you run over the cd size then you would run into issues. Or..
http://cdbkup.sourceforge.net/ This will do a backup to cdr/w. Restores difficult.
http://www.webmin.com This will allow you to fully manage the server from a web browser. I use it on all of my Linux and Solaris servers. Samba, apache, sendmail, and just about everything can be configured though it. Works great!
Look at http://sourceforge.net they have tons of software.
Brett Simpson
Internet Administrator for Hillsborough County
(813) 301-7144
simpsonb@hillsboroughcounty.org
>>> jeffbarr@tampabay.rr.com 11/02/01 07:16PM >>>
Greetings All,
I have a client who has a network setup using an old Novell NetWare 3.2
server and Segate Backup Exec. Their clients are a mix of Windows 3.11/95/98
systems. They are reluctant to upgrade this old and dying unit to an NT
solution because of the costs involved and the uncertanty of it working. I'm
certain that for around $300 in hardware, and some "free" Linux based
software, I could get them an excellent alternative. I only have 3
questions:
1) Is Samba good enough to set up as a Primary Domain Controller and file
server?
2) What is the best automated back-up software to use? Note I need to backup
stuf on the server as well as the clients.
3) What else would help make this a really sweet package?
I'm looking forward to all of your comments.
Thanks a bunch,
JB
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