Another day, another samba ... 3.2.11

[Lonniebiz]

This video explains a lot about why 3.2 is the way it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDQqkqkOJKo

[soorploom]

Well, that YouTube video was twentyseven minutes bludgeoned out of my life. Think I'll just go back to the less painful habit of chewing razor blades.

What did it tell me about the non functioning filesharing in z3.2? Well, nothing at all.

To sum up, it would appear that the release cycles are being changed, that community and commercial versions are the same but different and that z3.2 does have bugs but "don't tell anyone". As if! Service Packs are to be the norm every few months. Maybe. Next release due in December so perhaps that will cure the major difficulties with z3.2. Oh, wait a mo, this is December.

I'll hang on a bit longer to see what transpires with a server which is incapable of serving files, mainly as I must be nothing less than a mad masochist.

[Doward]

FWIW, I ended up moving my file serving duties to a FreeNAS system.  I have had *zero* issues with that system.

I use Zentyal for everything else on my network.

[half_life]

Freenas is a good choice.  I made that choice 3 years ago and didn't regret it.  Did you setup ZFS and implement snapshots?

[soorploom]

Now, that's strange you should mention FreeNAS.

That's what I used, quite some time ago, before I decided to go the Zentyal route.

Well, with all the faffing about with Zentyal 3.2 and now 3.3 and both of them having reduced by life expectancy somewhat, methinks that's where I'll be returning to.

I can say that I never had the same heartache with FreeNAS as I have with this stuff.

Enjoy your day.

[Lonniebiz]

The best thing about Zentyal, to me, is that it does a good job as domain controller replacement for Windows. Its good for creating domain users, and you can control permissions fine on windows servers that are joined to the Zentyal-created domain.

Ironically, since 3.2, it does a better job are controlling the permissions of a windows file server than it does its own file shares (located on the Zentyal server itself).

Thanks for suggesting FreeNAS, I will be considering it highly for my file serving needs.

Another thing I like, with Zentyal, is its gateway capabilities: Firewall, traffic shaping, port-forwarding, snat, network monitoring, VPN, web proxy.

Zentyal has a lot of good stuff, but I agree that file serving is weak right now. You'd think this would a be fundamental priority.

The fact we've had problems with this sucks, but for me the worst thing that could happen is if the domain controller got screwed up on an update (where users could no longer login to the domain). To me, domain controller is priority number one. If other things mess up, I can work around them easily, but if the domain controller screwed up, it would be super pain in the a$$ to create another one and rejoin all the computers to it (considering that you'd likely have to move each user's files to the new user profile on each windows workstation). At least they didn't mess this up!

SAMBA is such and important Linux project for SMBs. It has now evolved to a workable level; it just needs polish. Zentyal is super important too, because it brings to SAMBA a UI that bring the power of SAMBA to people who wouldn't try it without some type of GUI to configure it.

[half_life]

Zentyal is a good all around tool. It covers quite a bit of ground though.  It would be hard to be "THE THING" in all categories.  The best Zentyal is going to provide you is identical service to a Win2XXX server with nfs thrown in.

A dedicated tool like Freenas that has capabilities as a NAS and a SAN with built in replication etc is going to win the feature race.  ZFS is in my eyes a very important tool for file level integrity and recovery options.

Add ISCSI targets and you now can support high performance virtualization and HA functionality.

ETA: Freenas does not replace Zentyal but compliments it very nicely.

[christian]

half_life, I fully share.

Depending on what you target, FreeNAS (because of ZFS) or OpenMediVault (because OMV is simpler and somewhat lighter) are good NAS candidates, better than Zentyal in their respective domains.
This is not Zentyal vs. OMV or vs. FreeNAS. These are different solutions for different needs, even if there is some overlap.

I'm very glad you mention what iSCSI can bring in term of HA 

[Barrydocks]

- Zentyal file server is not what I'm looking for, not flexible enough and furthermore restricted to CIFS. I'm running another file server relying on Zentyal LDAP.

So what are you using as a file server?

[christian]

OpenMediaVault 

[Barrydocks]

OpenMediaVault 

That's interesting as I could never get it to auth against zentyals LDAP.  I might have another go, can I drop you a line if I run into problems?