Re: [LUG] Hard Drives and Networking

[Max Siegieda <maxsiegieda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Western Digital are good, although there are some better choices to be had in terms of drives. If it's speed you want, an OCZ vertex is blazingly fast and cheap at £90, alternatively you could get a Western Digital 640GB drive. If it's space you want, right now the best value (gigabytes per pound) are to be had with 1TB drives, specifcially the hitachi deskstar, at £50. If you want an external drive, well then you have some choice, but someone running a network that large should really have a fileserver.

On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Rob Beard <rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Brown Richard wrote:
> Hi All
>
> I need to buy some hard drives. I was looking at WD Caviar GP 500GB.
> Are they an ok drive please?
>
>

Western Digital are pretty good.  I believe they offer a 3 year
warranty, but saying that I think pretty much all the hard drive
manufacturers do nowadays.

> The other thing I wanted to ask is the pros and cons of running a
> network with a domain led server? I'm not quite sure if that is the
> correct way to put the question! We have a network of 9 pcs, 2 macs
> and a Linux file server. Sage data is being served by one of the Macs.
> We currently have an intranet being served by one of the pcs. We will
> be trying out various solutions to help run a locally hosted crm and
> so will probably load up a pc or a mac with server software to run
> something like Sugar CRM. So I wondered whether it is more efficient
> instead of having "workgroup" as the group to belong to whether it is
> possible to set up a server as a domain controller or something like
> that?
>
>

I'm sure you've asked this before.  Anyway, a domain makes life easier
with regards to user administration on the Windows machines.  You only
have to create one set of users and then attach each PC to the domain (I
think you can do the same on a Mac, at least I did something like this
on OS X years back).  The Linux file server should be able to act as a
domain controller (what distro are you using on there?).  The advantage
of adding each PC to the domain rather than a workgroup is that anyone
will be able to login to any PC (this can also be restricted on a per
machine basis if required).  You wouldn't have to have an account on
each PC for each user, and the users wouldn't have to make sure that on
each PC they kept their passwords the same as the PCs will ask the
domain server for authentication.

However you will need Windows 2000, Windows XP Pro (XP Home doesn't
support domains), Windows Vista Business or Windows Vista Ultimate (I'm
presuming you don't have Vista Enterprise).

With regards to the CRM software, I would guess that it could be setup
to use LDAP for authentication.  You should be able to configure a CRM
server to get the user accounts and passwords from the domain server via
LDAP especially if it's a Linux server running Samba.

Rob

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