This installation of Mandrake does come with a lot of extras, I know about. Some of the them will be implementations in the future, the file server is our only immediate install (I like to start easy (at least I hope it will be easy). Yes it will be behind a firewall, although our firewall is a Microsoft product that I'm hoping to replace sometime next year with a Linux version. I also want to replace our IIS 4.0 with Apache for our Intranet (can't tell you how sick I am of having to install patches for IIS as frequently as I do.) But for now Samba is my main goal. My husband is well versed in Linux so he is going to help us, and then also we have a friend who's going to join us for the ride to learn some Linux. From what my husband reviewed of the information that was available on the Mandrake, it looked like the best overall coverage, both for what we want right now and what the future plans are. I did however tell my manager that if I couldn't get it to work on the servers I'd buy it from the company. I figure that way I can convince them of more in the future! > I am going to be installing the latest Mandrake Linux package (8.1 I > believe), We are going to be using it for a file storage server and are > going to be using Samba to help communicate between this and our existing > NT 4.0 network. Are there any issues I should be on the look-out for? > Thanks. Mandrake? On a server? *shudder* Sorry, bad former job experience. My concern is that Mandrake's primary focus isn't a server system. (Mandrake users care to comment?) They focus on ease of setup for a workstation. So when you install mandrake, you'll get lots of stuff running that just doesn't need to be running on a server. (Like, X.) I imagine you'll also get stuff that you don't need or want like apache, ftp, telnet, maybe a nameserver, I dunno. Depends on the defaults and how far you dig. Will this box be behind a firewall or will it be sitting out on the open, untamed internet? You'll definitly want to inform yourself about the defaults either way, but it should be blinking red if it's a public box. Well, all I can think of for now. Pretty much any version of samba will play nice with NT4. Do you have a plan for backing up stuff? In the simplist form, you should be able to point whatever you're using for NT backups at the samba shares and get the data. But you won't be able to get a proper backup of the Linux OS that way. But that probally isn't a big a deal as it is with NT. With Linux you can, in general, make a tar snapshot of /etc and be more or less OK to reinstall and then extract your configs. -- Andrew S. Zbikowski | http://www.ringworld.org/~zibby Bender: You just think that robots are machines built by humans to make their lifes easier. Fry: Well, aren't they? Bender: I've never made anyone's life easier and you know it! _______________________________________________ Twin Cities Linux Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list