Samba 4 arrives with full Active Directory support The team behind the Samba Project has released version 4.0 of its open source Windows interoperability software suite, the first version to offer full compatibility with Microsoft's Active Directory protocols. The Samba stack is by far the most popular solution for networking non-Microsoft platforms with Windows machines, but …
As long as you dont have ANY MS servers you dont need CALs, so no MS fileserver/mssql/sharepoint/exchange etc etc once you have 1 MS server you need your user cals regardless of the domain platform.
The only issue with this is support, if I replace my DCs with samba and something goes wrong, whos going to support me, forum support is unacceptable because I would need help now (dont fancy 15,000 phonecalls saying they cant logon while i refresh a forum thread...). I am not talking the unix side of things, AD is incredible complicated so does go wrong occasionally.
Kudos to the Samba team for getting this done, even if it did take some "coaxing" from the antitrust authorities to make it happen.
And while Jeremy Allison's comment about source code availability is important to some people, and there are organizations where the cost of M$ software is not a significant limiting factor, cost is indeed a factor for many organizations. (especially in these economic times)
But to reiterate what someone commented earlier - I view one of the biggest advantages of an OSS solution to be independence from the usual commercial pressures that push organizations to spend lots of time/money constantly replacing things that work perfectly well, with new buggy junk just because you won't get the time-of-day from them if you don't.
I had a Netware 3.2 server at one client years ago that ran 2.5 years without a single reboot. No web/java/flash/complex document renderers/etc etc etc to make the box exploitable, no need to keep patching it, it just sat there and served files and queued print jobs for something like 1,000 days straight. I keep saying basic I.T. stuff should be like a toaster or a refrigerator - just sit there and do its job, leave you to spend time/money on more important pursuits, until such time you decide you truly need something the existing system isn't providing you. Not just because Evil Vendor Du Jour has proclaimed that stepping off the continuous I.T. Expense Treadmill of Doom is prohibited by the EULA.
"basic I.T. stuff should be like a toaster or a refrigerator - just sit there and do its job"
good point here. And yet no off the shelf NAS box can do the work properly if you happen to have HAM (Home Area Network) with more than 1 user and more than 1 Windows machine. And let's face it, in this age is quite common actually.
Hope Samba4 will change it.
The SAMBA AD implementation used to be "broken" and requiring a Linux hack to increase the number of groups per user, thus making incompatible with UNIX. (Ie Solaris, AIX, NFS etc). Is this still the case? Or can SAMBA 4 actually be used on anything but Linux? Other SMB implementation would not directly map a UNIX group to a Windows group thus avoiding the issue of running Windows 2003 server in native AD mode.
Is far more useful with a domain. (Without one stuff like live migration doesn't work).
I wonder what the minimal requirements for this are.
(As far as I know also hyperv server is totally free so you could do all your fileserving on that with samba as a DC) and have everything with no licensing costs for basic file / printer sharing. (Probably there is some reason you cannot dunno whether it is legally valid though).
I set up a Samba server for a training college when their previous Windows server crashed and burned.
It ran their whole domain - for approx 40 PC's.
It handled group policies which only allowed certain apps to run on the PC's.
It enabled all the staff to be able to hot-swap and just login at another desk.
It handled all their email and file sharing.
It sync'd to a hot-swap secondary server every night (no extra license costs).
It ran flawlessly for five years - I used to log in remotely to install updates.
And this was on a machine which was based on an mini IPX-EPIA board with a couple of SCSI drives.
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