Keep in mind that there is a fully-open source version of Red Hat. Red Hat costs money, and CentOS, based off of RH, is free. However, you get what you pay for.

In your situation, I would likely recommend RedHat, as they offer training, tech support, etc. Unfortunately, I have no experience with them, so I don't know how well desktop computers connecting to it will work.

But for Suse, I have seen what my school has done. 3 They have a central server (or, rather, a small cluster) known as Matrix. On many of the computers in the school, Suse is also installed, which allows you to login to that computer as though you were at the server.

Sounds strange, but what I mean is that your home directory is the same, as it mounts it as /home onto the local machine from the server, and it uses LDAP to authenticate users, so if you add one to the server, every client gets it.

The only problem with this approach, however, is that to keep the clients up-to-date, they would need to be re-imaged every now and then. You may be able to avoid it, depending on your situation, but it helps for conformity to do everything the same, rather than update each one individually. At the school, they reset the drive every reboot, so there is no way to avoid it.



To make that more simple... There is a server, and several clients. The clients connect, and the users can use their server accounts to login & do work in a GUI. The server can also be a webserver, database server, whatever else you need.

The problems with giving you the answers to the questions you're asking are:

(1) There's no one-size-fits-all answers.
(2) We don't know (nor do we want to know, and given the situation you probably shouldn't tell us) any significant details about your organization or business practices and processes -- see also: 1.
(3) It honestly take a significant amount of time and effort, even for the best and brightest around, to get and stay current enough that they can answer those questions reasonably for their own organizations, let alone yours.

As far as the distro choice issue goes, RHEL may very well end up costing as much to implement as a Windows setup. SuSE is slightly more reasonably priced, but still pricey. If you're trying to get "free but supported", ubuntu's the way to go -- it's got all the good things it gets from Debian's package management and maintenance efforts, plus a company (Canonical) that you can buy real, official commercial support from if that's your thing.

As for certification, I know very few people who put any weight or value on linux certs. RHCE in particular tends to pigeonhole people into exclusively being redhat people and doing things the redhat way. Not that that's strictly a bad thing, but it rather limits your scope and what you'll think of for options.


I'll second the recommendations for Samba, Bind, and Apache. Squid's commonly used, and so is CUPS, but honestly in most business setups they're not strictly necessary. Further, if you're talking about replacing server functionality, you should definitely get comfortable with Samba's winbind functionality (including Kerberos) and LDAP.

I want to thank all the friend who care and give me help and support and there time to reply me and gives me the first step

I've got the CBT for Suse Enterprise 9
I'll start my self training and i have an extra desktop I'll implement that'll learn from the CBT on it
if u have any suggestion please let me know before getting deep with these CBT's

if i stop in anything i will get back to you if you don't mind
coz you are really kind and helpful

thank u again and wish me a good luck
regards
Ra7eeel

Get on the web and search for the terms "IBM Redbook Linux". There is a red-book on converting from a Windows environment to a Linux one, step by step. If you will be all Linux, then there is also NFS for networking.

There is a website that has a lot of Linux Documentation: www.tldp.org. Three books on that site are very good: NAG2 (Network Administrators Guide), SAG ( Systems Administrator's Guide ) and Advanced Bash Scripting Guide. There are many more howto's as well.

If you will be using Samba, Fedora, SuSE and other distro's supply 4 samba books with the samba package or with a samba-doc package. You could download them from the samba.org website as well.

You will have a lot to learn. Installing a distro at home and digging in is a good idea. Even if it is just to study what you are learning in training.

i have no ward to say more than thanks and god bless you
for helping me
if u don't mind I'll keep in touch inform u with my steps
thank you again you and all the friends here
regards
Ra7eel