Sorry if this is a daft question or am I missing something ?

I am considering using the above server software for our business server, but I annot find how many users it supports ?

Microsoft server 2003 states how many users, such as standard 5 user or 25 users, but I cannot see anything stated on this version Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES Version 4 x86, AMD64, and Intel EM64T, surely it is not unlimited ??

thanks in advance

Heh...welcome to the beauty of Linux. It is indeed unlimited.

Makes you hate Microsoft, doesn't it

Depends on a number of factors like cpu (speed and number), memory, bandwidth, hard drive space and and a number of other factors. Basically, yes the number is unlimited within reason of course. You cannot expect any OS on minimum hardware to support an unlimited nuber of users. On a fairly decent system say a P4 with 1-gig of ram and 100+ gigs of free hard drive space upto 50 users can be support without much effort. I have personaly seen some work sites with 300 to 2500 users supported on a fairly small number of servers (3 to 10). The only real limitations are the hardware and support requirements.

This is not Microsoft, nobody forces user limits based on licensing ($$$) requirements.

I have a new Dell Power edge 2900 with 2 gig of ram and 136 gig of raid array 5 and want to use it to serve to 30 PC's to be able to log on to it.
was looking at Windoze server 2003, but the costs seem to spiral when you add CAL's (Client Access License)

Just need some decent server software and Apache would be nice to serve up some functionality on the intranet via a browser

I hate having to make decision like this ! Do I donate to OL' Bill £2500 or pay £900 for the Red Hat full version? There again there is a license for updates and tech support, but you are not getting mugged for CAL's

I like Unix / Linux as version OSX and web use
Can't see how costs are supposed to be advertised as comparable ?

Have you looked at CentOS? Basically the same packages as RHEL but for 0 cost. In fact the CentOS version is the equivalent to the RHEL AS version. I use it, it works great. Support could be an issue, but that is what sites like this are for - CentOS also has a forum on their website for problems.

thanks Denes,That looks interesting !

Can't figure out which version to download, not sure if version 4 supports intel X86 on thePowere edge and a raid array 5, what machine are you runnng it on?

I have tried two systems with CentOS 4.3, an Intel915G MB w/ Intel EM64 processor based system and a Pentium M based SBC system. I have used both the 32 and 64 bit versions. I have also tried RHEL U2 WS on the 915G system. Unfortunately I don't have a PowerEdge but I would not think it would have issues even with RAID. If you want to use 32 bit then download the latest 4.4 i386 version. If your system supports 64 bit, then download the x86_64 version. I didn't see mirrors that had the 4.4 version for 64 bit on it yet but one thing that is good about CentOS is you can use "yum update" to upgrade from 4.3 to 4.4 (I don't think RHEL supports this, you have to reinstall to upgrade versions).

All users are not created equal, so your answer depends on what the users will be doing when logged in ....if they do actually log in. Many of our users only get to the server via a web application. This is a very light load on the server. It will amaze you how many users you can sustain that way. But if you have mostly CAD/CAM users they would be resource hogs so you would want to keep the number down.
Another option if you like Red Hat is to look into Fedora ...that is the free version. It has newer unsupported code in it but if you have any problems the fine folks here could most likely help you out.

To Denes

Look again; http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/4.4/isos/

CentOS 4.4 ISO images are available for the x86 and x86_64 based systems, the others are still at the 4.3 level