I read the comment about SAMBA. It's pretty good at looking like an NT/2000 server but it doesn't do everything a pukka Microsoft server will. I guess if you are installing a specific product the suppliers may only wish to support it if it's on the correct platform?
I think SAMBA does all the serving that NT will do, it doesn't run the server-side apps, of course. What can be useful is to serve the files from SAMBA to a smaller Win2000 machine which runs the "server" apps if it is really required.
Also matters if the application in question uses Win2000 CALs (IIRC 2K and NT4 CALs are not interchangable...)
Do you have money to get a consultant in for a day? I would REALLY recommend it.
Sure, but with what brief? As a consultant who has moved into the school for two years I observe that a lot of money is wasted because schools (particularly public sector) can't afford the "right" quality of consultant. We had one here, provided by the LEA looking at making SIMS finance package work on an NT server because they couldn't make it work on Novell and the IP
SIMS is a dirty word here. Originally FMS6 worked with Netware. Then an upgrade broke the SQL anywhere server (N.B. using "Install Shield" to put stuff into SYS\SYSTEM directory is a bad idea.) I've since spent far too long trying to get a W2K machine consistently even work as a server. Smbclient always works against it, half the time Win9X is convinced the server isn't even there.
addresses they allocated were a) the same on two interfaces and b) ended up ..255!
There are actually situations where both of these would be fine. Assuming someone knew what they were doing, which by the sound of things they didn't. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763