Samba vs TotalNet



For samba:

We use Samba here, on three servers, with around 600 clients, running
NT4, W98, W98 and even W3.11. We suffer no problems at all, and don't
have the need for support. Our Solaris servers are members of the 
domain, and all authentication happens via the NT PDC or BDCs.

We wouldn't consider paying for this when the free one is so good. I 
run all my Windows home directory etc. through Samba, and have no 
problems.

Samba ("no support") is under active development, including bug-fixes and
new functionality from end-users such as you and me.  Indeed, we have been
running Samba for only about a year, but the latest release includes no
less than three new pieces of functionality which I added here because it
didn't quite do what we wanted.  (Oh, and a couple of bugfixes, too.)  And
I was able to develop them very quickly. I doubt that would have been
possible with a commercial product.

Samba ("no support") has active email lists for end-users, where we can
pose our problems to sympathetic colleagues and it is likely that someone,
somewhere will have solutions (or at least feasible ideas).

It is a balancing act, of course.  For our Sun machines and its Solaris
operating system, we have well-established, official "support".  This is
the right decision for us.  (Having said that, one of the vital servers
here is free, "no support", Linux:  again the appropriate decision.) 

But equally, much of our critical software: 
o  Samba;
o  the "sendmail" version we use;
o  "Pine" email user agent;
o  majordomo maillist handling;
o  Perl for our user-admin scripts;
o  tcpwrappers (security);
o  and much else

is free, public-domain.  It has no "support" (in the commercial meaning)
but is ideal for us, in our environment, with suitable in-house technical
expertise.

So your technical and management people need to discuss together what you
mean by "support" and what you expectations of such "support" are.

The general impression I get is that Samba is far superior.
NB - HP, SGI  have both adopted Samba (and it is rumoured IBM will soon),
and they all must have gone through an evaluation process and rejected
all the rivals (ie Syntax et al).

I suspect even if we had the money to go for TAS i'd stick
with samba, the TNG stream looks very promising and I think that having
access to the developers is a real boon. 
I think the real questions to ask about support is not what's available
but how useful it is to you, what sort of fix times are the Totalnet
talking about, how good are their support people etc.

We are stack with pcnfs (interdrive) on our servers and have a lot of problems. 
We have considered totalnet which came free (1 license) with sun servers but it was not
perfect and sun dropped it for pc netlink - which is not very good either, but as far 
as i know there is an upcoming version from sun which will be better. we have also 
tested samba and we are pretty happy with what it does. If i were you i'd go for the
commercial version of  samba, i think the cost it fairly small.





For TotalNet

We use Syntax TAS here, but that's largely because we had the money at the
time.  There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Samba: you just can't
necessarily get exactly the support backup you need exactly when you need it.

I currently use TAS and have used samba in the past.  On reflection I do
prefer TAS for ease of use and administration, however once you get used to
samba it pretty straight forward.

My choice would be TAS.