Dumping Windows

[Les Mikesell]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 04:00, Malcolm Moore wrote:
> Can someone point me in the right direction here
> 
> Has anyone or does anyone know of documentation / tools
> to help migrate Windows Server users to Linux/Samba users
> 
> Specifically : I have 1300 users on W2k3 servers 
> I want to move the user accounts/home directories to Linux/Samba
> and keep the XP workstations and then in a while drop the XP
> workstations in favor of Fedora 
> 
> Ok, I could RTFM and wade thru Samba and Fedora documentation
> but I was rather hoping for a 'Guide for the Impatient' or a write
> up from someone who has alredy done it - Bear in mind there 
> are only 2 of us supporting these 1300 users !!

If you have to ask that question, I'd recommend starting with
one of the 'appliance' distributions for the server, either
SME server (http://contribs.org/modules/news/) or
Openfiler  (http://www.openfiler.com/).  SME server is
a better fit for windows clients and also provides other
services (email, web, ftp).  Openfiler just does file serving
but does NFS as well as windows so it would be a better
option for linux clients.   Unfortunately the version you
want (based on Centos 4.x) is still in beta for both of
these, but should be usable.  In any case you'll probably
want a less dynamic distribution for your server than
fedora which you should expect to reinstall often to keep
up with the version changes.  That's worthwhile on the
desktops where the applications are still evolving but
servers should be more stable, like RHEL if you can afford
support, Centos if you can't.

If you are considering network-boot thin terminal support
for the desktops, you might also like the k12ltsp project
which has versions based on both fedora and Centos:
http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com