I’ve been spending my time at work migrating over to a new file server. The old Windows 2000 file server was getting rather long in the tooth. Microsoft wanted to charge more than two grand for a Windows 2003 Server and CALs for the whole company, so I said “Piss on that!” and decided to convert it to a Linux server using Samba. I plan to move all the company’s print functions over to Samba in the next few days. My ultimate goal is to have Windows only used as Active Directory domain controllers and for Exchange. I would ideally like to get rid of Exchange too, but I’m not selling management on the idea, and they seem to have no issue forking over 8 grand to Microsoft when I could for over 1.5 grand and get Zimbra to do the same job under Linux.
Of course, this new file server is just a stop gap. The big plan for the following year involves consolidating our Andrew File System under samba, and to move most of the simulation data (which is into the terabytes) to a new distributed cluster file system written by one of my coworkers.