Linux Pro's

• Cost

  No licenses to buy (and no administrative overhead for tracking licenses). Don't forget VA Beach City Government audit nightmare.

• Tailored, dedicated servers can use cheaper hardware

• Security

  Gartner group recommends businesses switch away from IIS: details

  RedHat Linux offers one free patch subscription per person

• Platform independence

  Runs on a much wider variety of platforms than Win2k

• Runs on low-end Hardware

  For example, UVA Physics Department runs a Linux-based print server for a dozen printers on a 50 MHz PC.

• Widespread and popular. Supported by Sun, IBM, HP, Oracle, Dell, Google, etc.... See Netcraft survey

• All configuration is done in text files

• All maintenance can be done from text based terminal sessions.

• Used in Physics, Biology, CS, MSE, MAE, and ITC. There are experienced, knowledgeable people to help you. I have two on-line web courses:
  • Linux Short Course
  • Samba Basics

    that may be of interest.....

• Documentation is great. Authors are reachable via e-mail.

Linux Con's

• Bryan thinks there are fewer experts (except maybe Apache). I don't agree.

  Training and support are available: see Red Hat Certified Engineer program and Gartner review

• Microsoft desktop clients are a moving target, controlled by an organization with reasons to make them NOT work with Linux

• Hardware drivers are developed for the Windows market and (maybe) later are written for Linux.

Case Study

• I bought a Dell box with SCSI controller and 18GB and 36GB harddrives. It has 1GB RAM and a 10/100 NIC

• I installed Red Hat 7.1 and copied the password files /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and /etc/samba/smbpasswd from an existing Samba server.

• I wrote the samba configuration file

• I added disk quotas on all drives

• I arranged ITC backup for this machine

• I turned off telnet, ftp, and everything else. I limit access to ssh (SecureCRT and SecureFX) from blue unix and three subnets. Samba logins are allowed from these three subnets.

• I copied the files from a Novell server to this new server. Novell drives can be mounted under Linux.

• All users run the same netlogon batch file to attach to TWO Samba servers (sync'ed with userid and password) and map drives and set the system time.

Questions brought up during the talk

• How does RedHat make money? See their Annual Report.
• Do I own RH stock? No.
• How do I log on to a SAMBA server with a Win2000 PC and authenticate to that server without having a local Win2K login account?

  You can't.

  A simple workaround to a true logon is to log onto the Win2K PC, using a userid that is valid on the SAMBA server. Executes the samba logon script in the netlogon share. For example, if you have a server named MERCURY and the script file is named netmap.bat, then click on start-->run and type

  \\mercury\netlogon\netmap.bat

  The drives will be mapped and Win2K will remember the drive mappings for all subsequent logins.

  Make an icon so new users can run this script.

  You still have to create all the users on the workstation. Create the users with the same userid and password as on the samba server.

  Here is the Samba Development Roadmap and Wishlist.

• How do I get support? Read the factory manuals and use the experts at UVA.