[OT] [Gllug] Migrating Samba servers between domains - the hard way.

[Matthew Thompson]

On 8 Feb 2006, at 22:03, Mike Brodbelt wrote:

> That being the case, you might as well rip out the old NT domain and
> re-join the clients. It should then be easy to join your Samba machine
> to your new AD domain. Samba is well tested as an AD client, and  
> there's
> lots of docs out there.

that's exactly what I'm doing - but for business continuation both  
systems need to run at once to allow users to be migrated on an  
individual basis rather than big bang.

> MS are very good at this sort of thing - the downside is you rapidly
> find you're very locked in, and sooner or later you find that  
> Microsoft
> + Microsoft is your only realistic option. Taking the simplest path up
> front leads you to an environment you no longer have any control  
> over in
> the longer term. You have to consider the costs of lock in over the
> longer term, but I see no reason to believe that the software industry
> will, in the final analysis, be any different to any other industries
> where vendor lock-in is practiced.
>

We've been locked in for years and were since before I arrived. We're  
a small IT department in a rapidly expanding business where our base  
products are data in Microsoft formats. We produce more for Access  
than for anything else so we run SQL Server. Since we run SQL server  
and Access ASP and ASP.Net are easy jumping points from there.  
Exchange has also been installed since way before I got involved.

The costs over the long term for us aren't going to be any lower just  
because we replace file servers - at our size everything is licensed  
with per user CALs and all users have a requirement to access SQL,  
Windows and Exchange - since we're locked into SQL we're locked into  
purchasing Windows - the only one we could escape is Exchange.  
Placing extra Windows servers in costs about £500 more than the same  
Linux box in initial licenses but it also requires me to heavily  
configure Samba and test it; a process that isn't required when  
adding simple file serving on Windows. That extra day of install and  
testing time could easily be worth £500 to the company as it's about  
the daily rate for a developer's time.

The hassle in ripping out exchange and replacing it with something  
else is too high - many of the features that have been easily  
supported in Exchange + Outlook for years are only just getting the  
same level of connectedness from projects like Zimbra.

M at t :o)
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