Section 10.1. Introduction

10.1. Introduction

Misty Stanley-Jones was recruited by Abmas to administer a network that had not received much attention for some years and was much in need of a makeover. As a brand-new sysadmin to this company, she inherited a very old Novell file server and came with a determination to change things for the better.

A site survey turned up the following details for the old NetWare server:

  200 MHz MMX processor
  512K RAM
  24 GB disk space in RAID1
  Novell 4.11 patched to service pack 7
  60+ users
  7 network-attached printers

The company had outgrown this server several years before and was dealing with severe growing pains. Some of the problems experienced were:

• Very slow performance

• Available storage hovering around the 5% range

  - Extremely slow print spooling.

  - Users storing information on their local hard drives, causing backup integrity problems

At one point disk space had filled up to 100 percent, causing the payroll database to become corrupt. This caused the accounting department to be down for over a week and necessitated deployment of another file server. The replacement server was created with very poor security and design considerations from a discarded desktop PC.

10.1.1. Assignment Tasks

Misty has provided this summary of her migration experience in the hope that it will help someone to avoid the challenges she faced. Perhaps her configuration files and background will accelerate your learning as you grapple with a similar migration challenge. Let there be no confusion, the information presented in this chapter is provided to demonstrate how Misty dealt with a particular NetWare migration requirement, and it provides an overall approach to the implementation of a Samba-3 environment that is significantly divergent from that presented in Chapter 5, "Making Happy Users".

The complete removal of all site-specific information in order to produce a generic migration solution would rob this chapter of its character. It should be recognized, therefore, that the examples given require significant adaptation to suit local needs and thus there are some gaps in the example files. That is not Misty's fault;it is the result of treatment given to her files in an attempt to make the overall information more useful to you.

After management reviewed a cost-benefit report as well as an estimated time-to-completion, approval was given proceed with the solution proposed. The server was built from purchased components. The total project cost was $3,000. A brief description of the configuration follows:

  3.0 GHz P4 Processor
  1 GB RAM
  120 GB SATA operating system drive
  4 x 80 GB SATA data drives (RAID5 240 GB capacity)
  2 x 80 GB SATA removable drives for online backup
  A DLT drive for asynchronous offline backup
  SUSE Linux Professional 9.1

The new system has operated for 6 months without problems. Over the past months much attention has been focused on cleaning up desktops and user profiles.