Central Storage for windows user accounts homedirs .. hardware/software needed?
- by mtkoan
We have ~120+ users in our network, and are endeavoring to centralize logon authentication and home directory storage server-side. Most of the users are Windows 2000/XP machines, and a few running Mac OS X.
Ideally the solution will be open-source-- can this all be managed from a Linux server running LDAP and Samba? Or would a hacked-NAS Box with a FreeNAS or similar suffice? Or is Micro$oft's Active Directory really the preference here.
Is it viable to store PST files on this server for users to read from and write to? They are very large ~1.5gb. We have no mail server (or money) capable of Exchange or IMAP, only an old POP3. What kind of hardware horsepower and network architecture should we have for this kind of thing?