Replaced NT with Gentoo - and it ROCKS

[fourhead]

I have to report another successfull NT-Replacement-Story! My father has an engineering office (for water supplies) with six Win2k workstations and an WinNT server, but all computers are pretty much new hardware. Although I've often been involved in the whole IT thing at my father's office, there's never been much planning of how the network should look like, so over the years there has grown a pretty chaotic network, resulting in a NT server with an expensive tape drive, but no backup software, absolutely chaotic user account management, no anti-virus, no real firewall. So I decided that this year my father's birthday present should be an complete re-work of the whole network in his office - and as a server - what else would I install there than Gentoo?

My father had a second computer, absolutely identically to the NT server (except the tape drive), so it was an easy task to install Gentoo on this other one in parallel, so we could do a "slow" switch to Linux on the server, without interrupting the ongoing work. Installing Gentoo from stage3 was a matter of like 30mins (no X at all). The only packages I ad to compile where samba, spambayes and rsnapshot. And there comes the best part of the new server: rsnapshot. It's a cool, small backup script that utilizes rsync to make an exact backup copy of a given directory to another directory, which in ur case resides on an external firewire HD which acts as removable backup media. Rsnapshot features incremenal backups by only copying recently changed files, but creating hardlinks to the previous backup directory. This way, you got a bunch of backup dirs called daily.0, daily.1, daily.2 ... with the newest in daily.0 and the oldest in daily.x. Each directory contains the whole content of the backuped harddisk at the given date, but thanks to hardlinks most files are only stored once.

But now comes the really cool thing: The firewire HD is kept connected on the server, mounted as read-only and shared by samba read-only, so now every user has a drive X: on his windows machine containing backups of the last 4 weeks, and restoring a file from this backup is as easy as just copying it from X: to C: or whereever. No more hassling with tape drives, strange (propietary!!) backup software and such. My father and his collegues said this was the best, easiest backup solutions they've ever seen, and it made them really LOVE Linux.

But samba also has some great features that really rock: During my samba setup, i discovered vfs modules for the first time, and I now have two of them running: recycle and clamav. The clamav module scans all files that are opened/saved on a samba share for viruses while freshclam updates the virus database every four hours. If a file contains a virus, a popup message appears on the windows machine and access to the file is denied (only root - respectively a windows Admin can move it but regular users can only delete it). Also the recycle module is really, really cool and something that I would no know how to do with Windows. When you delete a file on the Server from one of the Windows clients, the file is not actually deleted but moved to a Recycle-Bin-like folder. This folder is auto-deleted every sunday.

The third cool thing I have installed is Spambayes. Some of my father's collegues really had problems with spam, so I decided to install that. Setup was really easy, and Spambayes now acts as a proxy for the POP3 and SMTP servers, so all I had to do on the windows machines was to change the actual POP3 oder SMTP server name to the name of the Linux server. Each user can train the filter by forwarding mails to good@linuxserver or spam@linuxserver respectively. After training it with like 50 mails (~25 good and ~25 spam) the filter now works almost perfect. On each windows machine, I've set up the mail program to show good mails in green, unsure mails in orange and spam mails in red, spam mails are also moved to a spam folder instead to the inbox.

This setup works for 1.5 months now without me ever looking at it again (well, I actually did look at log files and such, but I never had to do anything on it again) and it runs and runs and runs. It works so well, my father has given me €500 because he was so thankful that everthing works like it should now, and because he defintely saved a lot of money compared to a Windows-2000 server solution. My father and m even already planned to buy a second, smaller server which takes over the spam-filtering part and also acts as a web proxy - so all the Internet-related stuff would be on a separate server which is definitely a very good idea. I'm constantly rying to get some ideas what else I could do with the Linux server, I know there are almost infinte possibilities now - but what could be useful? Perhaps a cool groupware solution sometimes because me father's using Outlook a lot, and his secretary too. Any ideas/comments?

My conclusion: Linux just ROCKS, setting this up and seeing it doing it's work without any glichtes just really made me proud about this piece of software and for being a Linux-Desktop-Only user at home! It was so much more fun than setting up a windows machine where you just click here and there and then it works like Microsoft wants it - but MY Linux server works exactly like I want it and like my father always wanted it. Thanks Gentoo!!


Tom

[Jefklak]

Very nice to hear that!!
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{Linux User #333296}
Kernel 2.6.9-nitro4! << hurrah

[Muso]

Um ... ya... gentoo is nice
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"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think" ~ Dorothy Parker
2021 is the year of the Linux Desktop!

[Realmaker]

I think i read that story somewhere before
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Athlon 2600+ Barton, Asus A7N8x-X, nForce2, Asus Geforce FX5700 256mb, TwinMos 512ddr-sdram cl 2.5

Wer andern eine Bratwurst brät, der hat ein Bratwurstbratgerät.

[georwell]

You might want to get a second back up drive and have 2 firewire drives and mount both. That way if the backup drive goes, then the server, you will still have one left. This can happen. Other then that great setup.

[Promit]

Well, as long as it works, who cares what OS you use.
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Windows, Linux, whatever.

[trossachs]

Promit, you're not a secret agent for those M$ people are you?

[Naughtyus]

any chance you can post the scripts and conf's files that you used? (esp. backup & samba w/clam)

[cptmorgan]

[pianosaurus]

Interesting read, thank you. I stopped in the middle of it thinking "is this guy german?" and I had to scroll up to check. Why? Well:

[LucaSpiller]

[Cintra]

NT4 server - those were the days..
happily left behind
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"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" W.S.

[pianosaurus]

[Cintra]

[ChojinDSL]

I know exactly how you feel.

I replaced a Windows2000 server at work with gentoo.
Dual PIII 800mhz 1,5gb ram.

Currently its a print server and samba server with on access virus scanning enabled. Im currently in the process of "converting" the old ntfs disks in there to ext3+lvm2.
Its cool though, since I dont have to be at the machine all the time to check up on it. SSH and webmin suit me perfectly for the job.

[Promit]

[placeholder]

[Promit]

[DawgG]

great success story! i think SAMBA is just a prototypical example of how great, useful and flexible OpenSource Software is.

i'm just implementing sth. similar.
what i'm interested in is:

how do you handle all the NT-groups and users? because i have to use quite a differentiated structure in this regard.
do you just maintain users ("domain-users") and Administrator (=root??)
how did you set up the group structure? because i will use acls based on it.