hi,

i'm a newbie to linux, but a windoze power user most of my life.

as the office techie, i handle the office network of 15 pc's on a windows peer to peer network.

i have decided to start changing the machines over to linux slowly, beginning with the central data storage pc.

we have recently started getting error messages that too many users on windows network, so not all the users have been able to log in. when the users were 10 only, it was fine.

the question i have is, rather than continue with the windows peer to peer, which is giving the said problem, and rather than learning about windows servers, i would just like to setup a central linux server where both linux and windows clients could log in, and share a large base of office files (mostly ms word).

could someone guide me as the easiest way to to do this.

thanks.

I think that you are going to want to look into Samba . It should allow you to share files with Windows machines and it is included as part of most linux distros.

hi,

thanks for replying.

my understanding is that samba lets linux/windows machines share data over a ms-windows peer to peer network.

if that's the case, then the windows peer to peer network seems to say that 15 machines is too much for it to handle.

as such, i think i'm thinking more of a central linux server solution with windoze/linux clients attaching to it.

do you have a solution for that?

thanks

Yeah, Samba. Really, I'm not trying to be funny. You should be able to set up a centralized Samba server that can be shared by everyone. Samba is NOT limited to "peer to peer" networks. You also should do some digging into how you have your Windows computers sharing a network. You should be able to have WAY more than 15 users on a network.

If your current server is running the workstation versions of NT, 2000 or XP then it will only let 10 other machines connect to it at any one time. Samba does not have these limits.

hi,

don't have a current server at all.

all pc's are running windos xp professional sp1 or sp2.

i guess if i figure out how samba can be the central server, then the clients should not be able to log in at all without authentication from the central server.

also, this should probably permit roaming access, as it's going to be all central.

anything else would be peer to peer.

does that sound right?

It is possible to configure samba to be a Primary Domain Controller. I only use samba for peer to peer networking so I can only lead you to the documentation. You will want to run the latest release of samba.

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...TO-Collection/

http://www.sphaero.org/docs/w2k-samba-deploy-HOWTO.html