[K12OSN] Smb-ldap admin interface and hardware recommendations

[Julian Yap]

Hi all,

Just a quick update on my smb-ldap testing.

I managed to get Samba working with Fedora Directory Server as the
backend according to the instructions that were on their wiki.  It was a
relatively simple exercise and I was satisfied that it worked in
practice.

I then tried out installing smb-ldap on Debian Linux (sarge) using
OpenLDAP and Samba.  To start of with, I only found 1 site which
actually had instructions for installing OpenLDAP on Debian.  After 2
days of trying to get it to work, I gave up.  There's more I could say
but I won't.

By now I felt I had a better understanding of Samba and LDAP so I
installed it on CentOS and it's working fine for me.

I'm up to the part now where I'm evaluating web-based admin interfaces.
Right now I'm using smbldap-tools which is fine for the command-line but
not practical for the long run and for administration to be done by
others.

I tried out IDEALX Management concole with samba-console today but ran
into errors and annoyances like:
 - Login session timeouts requiring a browser restart.
 - IDEALX supplies a SSL certificate that has expired.
 - Display of certain screens is messed up.  eg. User screen.
 - Errors for some parts and the login button at the top right doesn't
work.

Basically, it's not a mature solution.

What are the other solutions people have used?  I'm looking into testing
out LDAP Account Manager (http://lam.sourceforge.net/) shortly.

My second question to the list was about hardware and recommendations.
We're about to buy the hardware for out smb-ldap solution.  This would
be for ~330 students and I'm not sure how many teachers.

I just wanted to quickly ask what were the hardware specs on your main
PDC?  Would you recommend more RAM?  Would you recommend a 15000rpm SCSI
drives as opposed to a pair of cheaper serial Hard disk drives with
software raid?

We were thinking of an Athlon 64, 2GB RAM, 36.7GB 15k RPM SCSI.  We
would initially also use this to store the home folders and profiles. As
our needs grow, would add more file servers.

Thanks,
Julian