RE: Switching to the Penguin (was Re: MP3 Backup)

["Ian Lowe" <ian@xxxxxxx>]

>You're a brave man! What motivated the switch - stability, cost,
>software availability, something else?

A few things. The last straw was actually MP3 related.

My Win2K Server provided the following:

DNS/DHCP/WINS for local network
File sharing for myself and Jen personally
Company Document storage/tape backup
MP3 Archive Storage (240Gb)
NAT Shared Internet Access (4 machines)
Girder IR Control
HomeSeer /CM11 Control
ASP Based Web Home Control interface
Winamp Based Whole house Audio

A lot of setup, and a lot of work. I had to rebuild this *from scratch*
four
times in three months, each time through the same thing: adding a
"foreign"
disk volume from another machine to copy files.

I installed a Red Hat 8.0 server (as the older kernel in the Mitel SME
Server I have used previously doesn't support ATA133) and set up Samba
to
take on the File sharing role. I was *gobsmacked* at how fast it was.
Windows XP still has problems accessing the shares when you copy a few
files
in a row, but it's much, much faster from Samba than W2K.

At this point, I set up bind and dhcpd to take over those roles, and
moved
pretty much everything across to the RH box. As of now, the W2K Server
provides:

Girder IR, homeSeer, Winamp and ASP Based web frontend.

Cost doesn't really come into it, as my W2K is free under the MS
Partner
program, but reliability is a biggie.

I'm also absolutely smitten with PHP/MySQl/Apache as a combination. we
recently rebuilt the wintermute website using PHPNuke, and I see real
potential for home HA systems using this combination. :)

>(PS. Please don't lets descend into yet another "My OS is better
than
>yours" discussion :-)

Indeed, I would love to have a good on-topic discussion about the HA uses
of
the various OSes, rather than an OS holy war

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