Bad Days With Windows

Today is one of those days why Linux seems better and better because today is the day Windows Small Business Server crapped out again. I do not know if it is just me but it seems once a year around this time my server software craps out and I have to reinstall which requires a return to backup. Last year at this time there was something which caused the blue screen of death and it was time for a new server so it got upgraded to better hardware. It is hard to not think about using Linux for the file server to store the files for a server that will not crash. The server software is SBS 2003 and an upgrade is needed but the cost of SBS is very pricy and it is hard to justify cost for just a file server. One problem is though we live in a Microsoft Windows world and it would be hard switch but in these days Linux plays well with Windows. The switch would be just the file server and this would put things in a more stable situation.

When it comes down to servers you have to upgrade the operations system to keep it up to date and secure and does not matter how old it may be. Today the Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 came up with blue screen of death and might have messed up the back-up in the process. When Window breaks it breaks and it takes forever to put back together. Even if you have to re-install and restore from back-up it still a full day commitment by a network admin which never have the time for and this is the worst time of the year to happen. At these times you may think about upgrading even if it is not the right timing but either way you got to get things going quickly.

In this case it was a bad hard drive which will wreak havoc on you for at least a week or two by the time you get your files in order. For a long time Microsoft’s Small Business Server was the choice of our main file server which worked great when you used Windows XP but now there has been more flavors of windows out in the market the perks of SBS has faded. The new computers come with more of the home additions and can be getting converted to a work environment with an upgrade. The business upgrade will allow domain connectivity for network security will be available for the users in this environment. At this point a simple purpose was needed a file server which will allow these files are read only over here and those files are read and write access over there.

Looking at the server in the grand scheme it just was not worth the price to replace the main hard drive which will fail in less than a year due to the technology EIDE just is not what it used to be. There was an old set of SCSI hard drives sitting around doing nothing so they were tried. The windows driver which was downloaded in hopes it will work failed so the decision was made to put the Debian Linux disk in and give it a try. The install found all the hardware and installed the files correctly and amazed to see the install had the info for the SCSI hardware. In a short period of time there was a working Debian desk top working correctly.

Ok that was the easy part getting the rest of it together took l almost two days of looking stuff up trying it out. I found a video which helped out a lot because it walks you through the setup of windows file server in Debian http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7AHu0rax_4 to see the set of videos to get you up and running. There was some other issues like getting an ntfs file system to share in a Linux box but it is up and running. The openssh server addition was installed with putty for remote access and this makes making server changes much easier.

After the install and configuration was completed the feeling of free of Microsoft is starting to take hold I do believe Microsoft has done a lot for example the Microsoft.Net framework which has made so much happen to user to database interaction to make e-commerce what it is today. Even myself I have created a very large web presence off of http://www.epiccomputers.biz to have all the things in place but when it comes down to the prices for software upgrades it can be hard to reach in these economic times. So at times the decisions have to be made to choose the more inexpensive avenue to keep the books balanced. When it comes to this one it was a winner and will stay in this condition until the next break down.