Hi friends,

I'm currently working in a high school in Brazil. We have a laboratory with 40+ machines running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and a server running Windows NT 4.0 Server.
We have a set of good reasons to want to migrate to linux, from price to performance and mainly stability. I think a good way to do so is start with the server.
This server is a simple machine running simple tasks. Is a Pentium III 750Mhz, 128Mb RAM, 9.1GB SCSI HD (x2), Adaptec 2940 Controler, 3COM 3C905TX 10/100Mpbs NIC. It only makes the user autenthication and acts as a file server. The disks are mirrored by software (a solution built-in on NT), since it's a inexpensive and effective solution to prevent data loss caused by hardware failure.
My doubts are:
1) Is it possible to migrate from NT Server to Linux, mantaining the configuartion of the Workstations? Can I mantain and use the user's profiles? In other words, a Linux based server can act like a Windows NT Server Primary Domanin Controler?
2) If yes, is it hard to do? What software will I need?
3) Actualy, may I find some help/faq/documentation/books of Linux directed to Windows NT users? Some like "what you did in NT this way, with Linux you'll do..."? I'm sure many other people want to runaway from Microsoft and have some of the same dificulties I'm having.

Regards,
Leandro Collin de Castro.

Hi..
U can use samba.
Visit
http://www.samba.org
siddiqu.T

I don't know about the latest in the 2.2 Samba tree but the 2.0 servers wouldn't act as a full PDC, there was a patch that needed to be downloaded and applied to the source as it was still 'experimental'. I havn't used it myself but know someone how has been using it for sometime without problems.
I assume there are details on the Samba www site as above.

You can do the software RAID in linux too so that won't be a problem for you. Have a look at http://www.linuxdocs.org for various HOWTOs. Some seem to be getting a little out of date, but I'm sure they'll be useful.

Jamie

Samba
 

The latest version of samba 2.2 is capable of being a PDC for and NT domain and validating NT workstation logons. They're still working the bugs out of the win2000 compatability...

:) good luck!!

try LSP
 

hi,
you can try LSP provided by das technology.
http://das.com.tw/elsp.htm
LSP can migrate all your users , passwords, file sharing configuration, shared directories, groups, ......... from NT or 2000 to Linux. LSP is based on Samba, LSP will automatically reconfigure Samba to work as the original PDC on NT/2000. We have tested in on a 500 users , 800 shared directories, and about 20GB files enviroment. It works pretty well.

:)