[Klug-general] Samba....

[Alan at comm-tech]

On 26/04/11 22:04, Peter Childs wrote:
> Just a quick straw pole, does anyone here actually use a Cent-OS based
> distro on a day to day basis?
Centos Rocks. We admin a dozen Centos Servers (running samba, some PDC) 
and by far they give the least trouble - this one's still running Centos 4:

[root at mythos ~]# uname -a
Linux mythos.bac 2.6.9-42.0.10.ELsmp #1 SMP Tue Feb 27 10:11:19 EST 2007 
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[root at mythos ~]# uptime
  20:18:16 up 1173 days,9:04,1 user,load average: 10.19, 10.07, 10.01

Being such a stable old kernel there's no zero day vulnerabilities, 
historical vulns are patched in the Centos vanilla.

With samba configured correctly, you can even get folder redirection and 
network recycle bins working - which (apart from Exchange) pretty much 
emulates a Corporate Win$erver - minus the stoopid m$haft updates that 
come down and break everything every so often. Best of both worlds :)
> There seams to be quite a few Cent-OS based disros around, usually for
> quite specific "server" based jobs. where the creators don't want them
> played with, (or at least only in the ways they specify)
Have been testing ClearOS for about a year and although it has it's not 
as "configurable" as centos bare, it cuts a full system setup time down 
from about 3 days to 3 hours + tweaking. Takes a little more time to 
maintain though.
> Its like Cent-OS is being used in a lot of places to gain the Free of
> Linux without gaining the other benefit of it being Open ie the
> Freedom. (Which when you read the small print rather means its not
> Free at all! One could argue that some of these "products" verge on
> breaking the GPL, I'm still trying to work out what ClearOS are
> selling, I think its hardware and support but I'm not sure!
They used to be Clarkconnect, then some venture capital bought the 
developer and formed the "Clear Foundation". It's the classic OSS 
business model, they charge for the frills that a non techie would have 
pay a techie to do, like remote backup,  Anti Virus/Malware 
subscriptions, bandwidth monitoring with pretty graphs etc.

Alan