I am the network administrator for one school of my university and I am considering migrating our Windows 2000 Server to Debian due to some stability issues and of course the financial factors.
We only have one windows server in the network and it is providing nearly every service offered on our network. It is configured with Active Directory and DNS, serves student web pages, provides ftp access, acts as a file server, authenticates logins, and is probably used to send pornographic spam to the children of th world when I'm not paying attention. Being one of Microsofts finest products, it provides ALMOST an entire week of solid performance before a yet unknown application kills the server process preventing all logins including logging into or unlocking the console, meaning it requires a press of the power button to shutdown windows. The weekly reboots required to keep the server functional are annoying because they always seem to be required when it is least convienant for me to make the 30 min ride into work to press the power button twice and drive home... so its time to start working toward a more stable solution. I've been researching this problem for over 6 months trying every far-out idea I come across to find the cause to no avail... I give up, so either I rebuild the network with W2K server, or go with linux. Considering I'll never get the funds to upgrade to a new Windows server version in the future, likely forcing me to go with linux at that point; I figure I'll just get ahead of the game and go linux now. My questions for all of you very helpful type people are: 1. The server is a Dell PowerEdge 2500 dual Xeon, 1GB RAM with a PERC 3/Di RAID controller, would I have any issues with hardware support? I'm pretty sure I'll be ok, but I'd love to have someone tell me that it's better than supported... It's flawless." Or something close! 2. Is it possible to build and configure the server on a spare workstation, then when I am satisfied with the configuration and have tested everything, migrate the configuration from the workstation to the actual server hardware (I can't afford the down time it would take my newbie ass to install and configure everything). If so, how difficult is this and could I get a rough overview of the process to get my research started? 3. I currently have 3 Debian servers on the network, one LAMP server for our intranet and two 750 GB file servers (one's a rsnapshot backup of most of the other) providing data storage, and disk based backups of the windows server. The file servers currently use winbind to authenticate their Samba shares to the Active Directory... What will I have to do so that these servers will still allow access once the Windows Server is gone. Will I have to create 200+ users on each of my Samba servers, or should I use some sort of central authentication. Any advice on this issue would be welcome. 4. Our windows server currently runs Symantec AV daily to try to keep the spread of viruses via the file server at a minimum... Is there a equally good free product for linux that I could use to scan the user data. I'm not worried much about protecting the server from viruses cuz I know there aren't many for linux... But I'd hate to have my users (who can't seem to sit at the same computer twice) to spread it around my labs. 5. Considering that I'm fairly inexperienced with linux I would have to say that it is likely that my current windows server is more secure than anything I would put together with linux, apart from the rediculous holes within the OS itself anyway. Is there an easy way to ensure a resonable level of security without needing to research too deep into securing linux, securing apache, securing ftp, securing... I don't have the time to do much more than keep it patched once it's set up. The server is behind a BSD router that is managed by someone far more experienced with such things than I, so other than the few ports I'll have forwarded in the router (SSH, HTTP, FTP) the server should be relatively safe from outside attacks. 6. Any suggestions about migrating users and their data? 7. Finally, other than the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, which I understand is the best resource for all things Debian... Are there any other texts I shouldn't go without in this quest. I'm sorry this is such a long post, I just wanted to try and answer all your potential questions before they were asked. I'm not looking for a detailed howto, I know how to research and figure things out, I simply have a very hard time deciding what is the best approach to most things in linux. That and any pitfalls to watch outfor or issues I'm likely to face if I follow your suggestions would be great so I don't get discouraged before I'm done. Once completed, this will be a far more complicated solution than I have ever implemented with linux, so please try to take it easy. I'm still a newbie, hopefully I'll feel deserving of a better title once the project is complete! Here's 1/2 ton of thanks in advance, other half on completion of the project! Joe -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
