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Re: [LUG] Fwd: Linux @ School - Are we serious?



Mark Evans wrote:

hi mike

i was being a bit tongue-in-cheek RE MS products but recent experience has pushed me to it,

in work we bought new server and small business server 2000 for our own use - the boss only really know MS whereas i did programming at college and then mainly worked on DOS/UNIX/Progress for the next few years.

anyway - the SBS server,

wanted,

file serving,
print server,
proxy server,
shared internet access,
dial on demand dialling to the interweb,


What's the interweb?


work in joke for internet





VSS


What is VSS?


MS visual source safe - a source control program



SQL server 2000
exchange server so we could send and receive emails from our work domain
tape backups,
RAID 1

now - we spent 2/3 weeks leading up to christmas trying to set it up - we enrolled help from a very experienced MS engineer - and a cousin who is fresh out of an MSCE 2000 course...

...and the results are...

file serving,
sort of works - but network drives are not recognised until i click on them in explorer - so most automated processes fail.


What is the server running and what are the clients running?



server win2k - clients NT4/XP


2000 dosn't appear to like serving to 9X under some circumstances,
IME.


print server,
had to use

c:\net use LPT3


Never seen the net command used quite this way, also isn't
it usually in c:\windows or c:\winnt?



yeah normally it is on the path - so i was just typing what is on the command line. it was recommended by a posting at www.deja.com and it worked ok.

actually - now i look at it the line is wrong - let me think

it was something like
net use \\SERVER1\printer_name LPT3



etc to get it to work - apparently HP have deliberately disabled the networking part of the printer driver to 'encourge' sales of their network printers - of course - if the driver was open source etc etc etc


You mean you can't simply connect the printer to the server
share it and put a URL of \\server\printer in the box?


that's correct - there were huge numbers of posting RE this problem - it got very confusing with regards to which driver to use and the change from NT4 to win2k etc. anyway, i found the 'net use' tip and found that it worked. that was where i found the claim that HP had stopped their printer driver from working via a network. apparently on their site they claim that the 990 series are not network printers!?!?!


What kind of printer is this?



HP deskjet 990cxi



proxy server,

worked for a bit then stopped after the third reinstall - anyway, does not work with mozilla/opera (there is a bug at mozilla lodged concerning the non-standard authentication) - and cos IE crashes my workstation web browsing is not fun


Do you actually need authentication or simply restriction by source
IP address.



we do not need authentication - restriction by IP address would be ok.



shared internet access -
er - the firewall client (what is that for?) seems to be stopping this,

dial on demand,

takes ages to fire up - and then can not be shutdown manually - according to a KB article this is by design to not allow a user to shut down the link if they were not the user who started the link - and if the link was brought up by dial-on-demand etc etc etc


This is just silly...



i know - it was funny really when i'd been checking this out for a few hours - and finally ended up at the MS KB article which said this was 'by design'. i showed it to boss and said that it looked like a dead-end to me!!



VSS

working

SQL server 2000

working - (thank god - otherwise we wouldn't be)

exchange server

er... not likely mate - just never worked - kind of worked to send emails to eachother - but gets confused because our domain logon names are different from our email address names. (maybe we should reprint our business cards)


You could try changing your login names, except that this isn't
exactly easy under NT unless you have a very simple set of
permissions.



MS windows networking confuses me to be honest!!! people seem to get around things be dishing out all permissions to all users!
rather than working MS and learning its networking i am working at boss and teaching linux!


tape backups

boss is still banging at this - but usually mutters bad things about it every morning,

RAID 1

one drive has gone down already - because i have lost faith i would bet that its the OS and not the hardware.


If it's new hardware it could well be the hardware. The drives arn't made by Conner are they?




IBM maxtors i think


oh - and the error logs fill up with incomprehensible errors about every week or so.


i see the problem as this,

active server directory depends on a DNS server for everything - dial on demand is linked to the ISA proxy server which is linked to the firewall software. and they all rely on DNS server. - they are too interconnected for their own good.


Are you running a DNS server, with both forward and reverse zones
for the LAN? Otherwise dial on demand with just about any system
can end up chasing it's own tail.




i only set up the DNS using the wizard - i will be setting up DNS on my linux server soon to be able to understand it better. i must admit that my understanding of DNS servers is weak.



and as for active directory services - it is such a confusing mish-mash that it is extremely difficult to find what you want.


Active directory is LDAP, sort of..


also, we have to connect via a router to a network with UNIX/NT4/win2k servers - networking changes under 2000 but some NETBIOS stuff has been left in for backwards compatibility. networking has been made too confusing.


Win2k server quite often runs a whole bunch of services you don't
either need or want by default too...



ah! i'll have a look.



compared to a bunch of daemons each of which is set up by a .conf file in /etc well... to me, it doesn't.

......and our client's main servers with approx 11k of MS software on them just crash/reboot every couple of weeks - we now have a whole network of servers monitoring each other and sending out text messages when they have crashed - (including for all the batch processing which occurs during the night) so the managers can restart the processes from


Batch processing on NT???



the win2k servers are very busy during the night - bringing in data from UNIX servers, comparing and transferring data between win2k servers, processing data, updating a 'warehouse' of data so reports run quickly, producing data files which have to be sent back to clients. and don't forget backups, optimisation, transaction log shrinking etc.

the sites are 40/50 seat call centres and our servers process all the data in and out. there are UNIX servers controlling a predictive dialler - and our server controlls/formats the data in and out of this dialler.



home when they happen...fun and it doesn't make us look good.


How much is the hardware worth?


not sure - they are compaqs (M540 range?). probably 3/4k each.




again - they've had some very expensive engineers checking it out - but they still keep crashing. i know the DB's are sometimes very large - up to 12/14GB but this is supposed to be well within limits - and to be honset, i think SQL server is a good product.


Are the machines dedicated to SQL or are they also doing other
things?


pretty much.
only SQL server and a VB app which carries out the batch processing.

and my latest proposal is for a UNIX DB box and repoint the VB app to it. there is large amounts of data being chucked around and obviously being on a bus within the same machine would be quicker - but maybe we should
separate the processes.


kev 
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