[LUG] Linux vs Windows as a server.

[Ian Bishop]

Do you need MS Exchange?  Are they doing daily admin tasks themselves
(adding users, etc)?

I can detail a setup I did for a friend's company.  They wanted
Exchange, so I knew we needed at least one Windows server.

I built up a big honking Debian box with 8GB RAM, 6 RAIDed drives, and
fast CPU.  Installed VMWare and Windows 2003 Small Business Server into
a VM.  That became their Active Directory and Exchange server.

File services are Samba running on the bare metal Linux machine for
reduced latency.  I used Kerberos through PAM to pass through
credentials.

Windows backups are done with MS backup onto a file share on the samba
service.  Then all files are backed up to another machine using
rsnapshot to keep versioning of files.

Since, we've added VMs for spam filtering, web, FTP, etc...  It's all
worked very well other than a few quirks on the Windows machine.

If I had it to do again, I would use Xen instead of VMWare.  AFAIK
there's still no decent open source exchange workalike.

Ian Bishop
Senior Analyst, Lottery Systems Development
British Columbia Lottery Corporation
(250) 828-5500 x5371

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces at lug.kamloops.net [mailto:lug-bounces at lug.kamloops.net]
On Behalf Of Drew
Sent: March 18, 2009 11:03 PM
To: discuss at vlug.org; Vancouver Linux Usergroup; lug at lug.kamloops.net
Subject: [LUG] Linux vs Windows as a server.

Hi Everyone,

Disclaimer: I'm not sure what each lists policy is about accepting
cross posted questions so if I'm stepping on some toes I apologize in
advance. Also I'm not trying to start a OS war, merely get some
objective opinions from IT people who have worked both sides of the
fence.

I'm in the process of determining the best way to migrate a small
business away from workgroup/peer based file & print sharing to a
centralized server based model. I have four offices to convert and I'm
trying to decide whether to use Windows Server 200x or Linux (based
around RHEL/CentOS or Debian) operating systems for the servers.

What I ultimately envision is a setup whereby each office has it's own
file/print server that operates in an isolated fashion except for
login credentials which are shared across the entire system. The only
time the machines would transfer any bulk of data between themselves
would be during nightly backups. I see this being some sort of
rsync-like behavior mirroring the data on each branch server to the
main server at head office, from which backups to media are made.

The only other major technical constraint is the client machines must
remain windows machines so any *nix specific protocols that can't be
transparently buried in windows are out of the question.

So with that in mind, aside from cost, what are the pro & con's of
each OS in the application?


-- 
Drew

"Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood."
--Marie Curie

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