[H-GEN] AN OFFBEAT QUESTION

[Rick Phillips]

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On Sun, 2002-06-09 at 21:23, Sarah Hollings wrote:

>Does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of Windows 2000 Pro
    >clients which can be connected to a Win2000 Pro machine being used as a
    >file server?  I have heard that 10 is the limit.
    >
    >If 10 is the limit, is there a workaround - Samba for instance?
    >
    >Regards,
    >
    >Rick Phillips
    >
    Last time I installed W2kAdvServer the default for number of clients 
    connected was 5.  This is a licencing limit.  Presumably you buy so many 
    licences, or so many licences come with your purchase of W2kAdvServer, 
    and you can set the licencing service to limit by the number of seats or 
    the number of connections, by changing this number from 5 to something 
    else.  At U of Q we have a bulk purchase agreement, and people seem to 
    think that means you can connect any number of boxen up to the server 
    you want.  However if you don't set the licencing server to some large 
    number (and I am not convinced that our licence allows us to do that) 
    your Event log will fill up with red "X"'s.
    
The server in question here is Win2kpro (workstation version) not a
server version.  The Win2k pro "server" is a simple file server in a
supermarket situation which has just exploded in size from 8 to 18
machines including checkouts which all now sit on the network live.  The
checkouts used to stand alone and data was dumped at the close of
business.  Their grocery manager program runs software clients on each
machine which access common database files on the server.  There is a
Linux (Mandrake) box on the network which drives their satellite
internet connection.
    Licensing??  Yukk!!  The only kind of licence I want to see is with GPL!
    
    So yes, Samba would be a good workaround.  And in fact this workaround 
    is something I have been working toward at work for sometime, but 
    haven't got around to getting it working yet.  ;-}
    
    http://www.unav.es/cti/ldap-smb-howto.html   has a how to on getting 
    your Active Directory replaced by Samba + LDAP, but getting it working 
    is something else.  The aim is to replace the w2k server with such a set 
    up completely but with fires burning all over, and software projects way 
    over schedule even if there were 3 of me, I couldn't spare the time for 
    this.
I know that feeling ;>)
    
    What you can do is simply set up Samba as a DC, and then have as many 
    workstations as you want connect to it, maybe keeping your PDC W2k 
    server (which is probably your usual honeypot  listening on 100+ MSRPC 
    ports) on private subnet. There's a couple of dozen pages of HTML doco 
    that comes with Samba 2.2+, and its explained fairly well there how to 
    do this.  I understand that with Samba, you don't get Kerberos, so your 
    Win2k boxes negotiate down to NTLM, so lower security in theory.
    
    Sarah
    
    
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