On Sat, 2003-07-12 at 03:31, K B wrote: > I am trying to find a replacement for my school's Novell servers. The > goals are this: > -User accounts must be able to be limited in capacity (IE- each user > gets 5MB to use) Linux has had the capability to use disk quotas for a long time, though I think only certain filesystems support it (the standard ext2/ext3 should) > -Must be able to semi-automatically create users (feed it list of > names, create username/pw from that) (command line fine, can just > write scripts) This is not very difficult. Most Linux distributions come with 'adduser', 'useradd', and other utilities. I'm not aware of any utilities for adding lists of users, but I'm sure something would pop up if you looked around. Writing such a utility wouldn't be hard, either.. I should say that user management under Linux works under a much simpler principle than on Netware and Windows. You have users and groups, and that's pretty much it. There are no complex trees of users and other objects (like in Directory Services or Active Directory) on a standard Linux box, though there are ways to do that if you really need it. > -Be able to handle many (up to and maybe more than) 200 concurrent > connections (Current limit is 200) This shouldn't be a problem. I'm certain that others have had Samba setups running in to the many thousands of simultaneous connections. Samba may not be configured by default to allow this much traffic, but you probably only need to edit the configuration file to change it. > -Backups. Need to be able to do them in a timely, automatic manner. > (Cron job or whatever nightly) Major plus if files can be backed up > while user has file open. (Haven't found anything yet that does) In my experience, Linux applications usually don't mark a file as being "open" when something is reading it. I've seen it happen occasionally, but I think that only prevented me from writing to the file. If the system is configured properly, a "snapshot" can be taken of the filesystem, making it possible to recover to an exact moment in time, rather than the gray area of the few hours a normal backup takes. I've had good luck with using Amanda as a backup system, though many people find it confusing -- I hear it's great for anyone who has a tape robot, though. For people who find tapes too flaky or expensive, it now supports backing up to disk. Of course, there are many other open source and some commercial applications for doing backups. You could write your own utilities if you like.. > Could I do this off of a basic install of Mandrake 9.1? Anybody got > tips, or links, on how to do this? Most likely. This is one of the things that Linux is best at. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ You see, it's like the old / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ saying, "Everybody loves a \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) cane." [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20030712/68d9635b/attachment.pgp