@BRRABill Sounds like a situation I had to deal with last year where an organization was running Dell PowerEdge 2950 Gen II pizza boxes. I tried reasoning with them explaining that 9 year old servers should not be production machines for mission critical systems. They didn't seem to care about business continuity until they started failing.

Has anyone tried Zentyal CS with Samba to replace AD and MS Exchange? If so, did you migrate MS Exchange data? Did you encounter any issues? Was the user experience pretty seamless?

I am installing Zentyal right now to test this out, but I am curious if others have production experience on this topic.

@scottalanmiller said:

Carefully worded.... there is no guarantee of uptime or performance, only a guarantee of "100% SLA". That is, quite literally, gibberish. It has no meaning whatsoever.

This is so funny. I frequently read contracts with garbage like this for new clients to help get them on track. Just yesterday I had a client send me their Rackspace contract. They're paying 550/mo for what they thought was a dedicated server, but what they got was "Dedicated Account Management and Business Development Team". So basically they've been paying 550/mo for a VPS running Windows Server 2008 to host Quickbooks for two people. sigh.

If you have the dough to spend, Aerohive is really good stuff. Maybe I just like the platform better, but I see now that UBNT has upgraded UniFi, so I might need to thoroughly check it out before I commit to that statement. I just installed the new UniFi tonight because I saw this topic and wanted to check my config before commenting at all. If you want to do it on a budget, but not compromise the quality of the hardware then id go with the UBNT AP like @scottalanmiller suggested. Also I dont really bother with AC at this point because hardly any of my devices support it anyway, and I don't need those transfer speeds.

Keep in mind however ( not that this is a problem on my home network ) I think I recall reading some restrictions on those UBNT AP's. There was and may still be a hard limit of 127 devices per radio ( 127 @ 2.4 and 127 @ 5). In the forums people commented on a soft limit of 32 devices per AP, but I cannot attest to that having any accuracy. I don't know if you still need to configure wLAN groups for ZH (Zero Hand-off) to work, but it used to be that way for sure. Also there was a bug if you had the heartbeat checkbox enabled on the AP, MAC computers would randomly disconnect.

As far as switches go I really dont mind using inline adapters and barrel plugs with ac adapters. Id rather see one inline adapter fail than an entire POE switch, personally. This is really something you need to evaluate yourself.

I dont particularly like using Out-of-the-Box guest network configuration on UBNT equipment. My preference is to configure my own vLAN's and firewall rules. Last I knew you could have 4 SSID per AP, so I configure three. One for the managed network devices, one of personal devices and one for guests. Each SSID can be tied to a vLAN ID and you can introduce bandwidth policing at the SSID level. In my case, the managed network would be uncapped, the personal devices would have a minor cap, and guest networking would be "usable for general purposes". In the firewall I would isolate all three networks and block communication between them.

Anyway... that is my experience with these things. Hope at least one thing I mentioned helps you.

thx
-d

@BRRABill said:

0 anxiety scale because that kind of stuff always makes me nervous. Anyway, no problem, I have spare drives on the shelf ready to go. I pull out the

In complete honesty I will admit that one time I was cold swapping a failed drive in a proliant dl360G5 and replaced the wrong one. Fortunately the server wouldnt even boot and I was able to power it down, sort it out and bring it back up. Since then I will never run a server without the backplane kit and hot swappable drive caddies with the status indicator LED.

@johnhooks
ClearOS looks pretty cool. I might tinker with this first.

@MattSpeller Based on what you just said I finally understand where @scottalanmiller is coming from. I concede that the writes are simultaneous to the disks therefore should not backlog the cache with exception in that queues and seeks will be based on your slowest disk.

@JaredBusch

So I tested ClearOS and its not bad. Compared to Zentyal the screens load much faster and config changes happen faster too. Must be something in the validations?? My biggest complaint is I cannot test everything without buying it. Zarafa. etc are not free even in the community edition. Id give it 3 out of 5 stars since I couldnt test all the functionality and because as you stated, this is a wrapper to manage all the packages and features they decide you should run in the distribution linux they choose.

Going back to my plan of testing LDAP\Samba4 and OX App on CentOS.

thx
-d

@scottalanmiller said:

wn all of the

I lease with buyout from HP and use un-managed colo. An aged asset becomes a liability for my business continuity. However I dont think I would lease equipment from Rackspace fwiw. My aged hardware becomes dev hardware upon replacement.

thx
-d

@BRRABill said:

My drive failed almost immediately. I mean, whatever happened rebooted the server.

Go right ahead. Did that drive fail after replacement while it was in a degraded state? Id say your controller is failing if that happened.

On a side note, I pretty much only use RAID 1 mirror w 1 hot spare (3 disks total) these days in what I do. The apps I deal with and code for (mostly) are OLTP with tons of tiny write transactions. Using a small stripe size and only two disks, this setup benchmarks 13x faster write speeds for me than a RAID5 array with 4 disks, all day, according to AS SSD. The way we coded our software and designed the database everything uses GUID's for PK. GoDaddy premium dns provides round-robin load balancing ( I don't manage that part). In Proliant servers (dl360 G7 for example) I like to install both backplane kits and split the RAID1 mirror between backplanes. This is just to show as example that there's really not a one-size-fits-all solution for server configurations and redundancy. The software I develop (or run) dictates what I am able to do with the hardware.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

aww.. so SQL has DAGs now too, eh?

Yes, actually SQL is the only thing that has them. AD and Exchange are using SQL under the hood. When they need HA, it is their SQL that primarily needs it. DAG is a SQL thing (AFAIK) and applies equally to all SQL-based products.

Related to SQL but not iSCSI ( and not to hijack this thread ) I upgraded all my servers to MySQL 5.7 this weekend after finding out about the GTID and Channel features for multi-master replication. It works perfectly. This is a huge feature making multi-homed MySQL all-master all-active replication available in a community release. Someone should start a thread on this if there is not one already.

About the iSCSI, I think I recall I saw a similar error once and found out I was doing something wrong. More specifically I didnt have the allowed iscsi initiators set correctly.

thx
-d

@scottalanmiller said:

wn all of the

I lease with buyout from HP and use un-managed colo. An aged asset becomes a liability for my business continuity. However I dont think I would lease equipment from Rackspace fwiw. My aged hardware becomes dev hardware upon replacement.

thx
-d

@scottalanmiller said:

d only ever used semi-local. W

Wow! Toronto!? In HealthcareIT (When I worked for Eclipsys) I remember some problems we had because of conflicts between PHIPA and The Patriot Act. Id feel safer with my business in Toronto too, thinking about it.

150/25 Mediacom, DM, IA
$74 w basic cable.
At my local datacenter for my servers I pay $12/M 10/10 unlimited burst 95th%tile with a /28 subnet for BGP finished to my LAGG on Hurricane Electric and Cogent fiber.

thx
-d

@drewlander said:

I think I started the nethserver install once and got hung up on something or distracted and didnt go back to it. Ill be happy to install it and see how it compares.

Another thing that I was a little put off by with ClearOS is monitoring add-on was not free. Im not sure what they are offering but Nagios Core is freely available.

Some time I will need to put together a real technical analysis of these to break down the pros and cons, because they each have their own benefits and drawbacks.

@JaredBusch

So I tested ClearOS and its not bad. Compared to Zentyal the screens load much faster and config changes happen faster too. Must be something in the validations?? My biggest complaint is I cannot test everything without buying it. Zarafa. etc are not free even in the community edition. Id give it 3 out of 5 stars since I couldnt test all the functionality and because as you stated, this is a wrapper to manage all the packages and features they decide you should run in the distribution linux they choose.

Going back to my plan of testing LDAP\Samba4 and OX App on CentOS.

thx
-d

@scottalanmiller

I am installing it right now. Ill let you know.

@johnhooks
ClearOS looks pretty cool. I might tinker with this first.

@dafyre
Yes.

@scottalanmiller said:

Zentyal for a pure Linux environment would be really weird, though. Running Windows compatibility layers for systems that will talk to each other natively.

I dont think in many offices I can completely eradicate Windows desktops, but I am not against Samba4 and LDAP. I think it works quite well. That aside, I wanted to chime in on Zentyal since I recently tested it.

I finally fully evaluated Zentyal. Waste of my time. Its pretty much an Ubuntu install and web-based UI for people that probably shouldnt be touching a linux server. I can install LDAP and Samba4, and configure them without the help of their UI. The SOGo groupware is lacking because I feel like it should have something for Document Management. SOGo does not have a responsive UI for different viewports. Additionally the IMAP protocol will only support 50 connections, but I am guessing this is a Dovecot setting. Also you can only configure one domain per install which is totally lame.

My next test... LDAP\Samba4 and OX App, despite quite a few negative reviews I am willing to test it out.