On 2008-04-17, damo <votefordamo@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> * Primary Domain Server (SAMBA for Windows XP Pro clients)

Just to be clear, this is technically called the PDC, Primary Domain
Controller. The Samba docs will use this terminology a lot.

> * NFS (SAMBA again. I estimate serving a max of 5GB, not anticipating
> huge amounts of transfers)

Again, just for clarity, the file sharing protocol for Windows is smb.
NFS is completely different, and unless you're serving linux shares,
there's no point in going NFS, just use Samba.

> * Address Book (LDAP)

I believe Samba can use an LDAP backend for authentication, so you might
take a look at that.

> How does this look as far as distributing load. I was considering
> putting PDS and NFS on different boxes as I think these might be the
> two highest demands....

I think the standard recommendation is to put the PDC on its own box.
This machine could be fairly simple, just a RAID1 on an out-of-the-box
x86 clone. That complicates matters slightly, as now you have two Samba
server instances, one on the PDC, another on the fileserver.

> I wont have access to, or a budget for, high end server boxes.
> Instead I will be looking at buying more or less standard intel boxes,
> heaps of RAM and RAID 0+1 setups.

I don't know how much data you plan to serve, but for your Samba
fileserver you may consider more disks in a RAID5 or RAID6. Even a 1U
or 2U box with four or eight drive bays will serve a ton of disk. Don't
skimp here, get a real hardware RAID card and hot-swappable drive bays,
so that you can change a failed disk without downing the fileserver.

--keith

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