On Mon 07 Jul, Dave Williams wrote:

Having thought about this a little more 2 more questions came to mind.

1) If a Gigabit NIC is connected through a PCI slot isn't the PCI bus going to be a bottleneck?

2) Is it possible to configure multiple 100Mbit NICs and boost I/O speeds. The only problem with this is how to configure IP addresses and to make the multiple NICs transparent so that our 300+ machines use the same server through different NICs?

I think you have to distinguish between bits per second and bytes (or words) per second. A ISA bus running at 33MHz will move 33 x 2 x 8 bytes per second = 528 bits per second which is more than enough to keep a 100Mhz card running - and even a gigbit card will get nowhere like 1000M bits per second anyhow. A PCI bus is 32 bit - and will move twice that data (albeit contending with other devices) Most gigabit cards have 64 bit extended PCI socket - although they will usually work in normal PCI slots. I have an early gigabit card - which despite its 64 bit socket only operates at 32 bits! - firmware problems apparently! Multiple cards were the way to go for some - although I never tried this. So you have SAMBA running through one to provide file sharing, printing services through another, etc. In reaslity SCSI (3) would need to be in a large raid before it began to saturate things - - and even then only with large contiguous files. just my guesstimated opinions of course. (often not correct) -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School

On Wed 09 Jul, Richard Rothwell wrote:

Hi,

Is there anyone out there who has rigged Linux box to authenticate off an NT server? We have stumbled around and can work out how to use either Samba or SMB PAM. Neither can we find a decent Howto.

The SAMBA documentation is not bad - as far as it goes. I followed it and windbind works to the extent that the LINUX box sees the users - and computers. Now different people want different things. I want to continue using our NT domain server (which is part of a trusted domain - part of our administration - and trusted domains is not yet supported by Linux). I'd like to allow users to be able to logon to linux with their NT usernames and passwords and have homedirectories automatically assigned to where they are on a SAMBA (currently NT) share. I'd also like to run a mailserver on Linux which authenticates off NT - so I don't have to recreate usernames and passwords - nor keep them matched. Where I would agree with you is the documenation of PAM authenication modules which seem to assume from the start that you understand everything. Examples that are useful and comprehensible would seem to be non existant - and if you get to bold you lock yourself out of everything failry easily! Its not clear what mail software uses pam authentication. -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School