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A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

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    #1

    A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

    I must start by saying I do not see this as an Alpha 5 issue but is by way of a warning to others.

    We recently went to install an Alpha 5 installation at a clients with 5 workstations running XP connected to what we were told was a windows server.
    I did in fact turn out to be a Linux Server running Redhat Enterprise 5 overlaid with Samba 3.033.
    We simply could not get Alpha to run on this configuration as everytime we tried to start our application Alpha seemed to be looking for the first DBF file it needs in the folder

    C:\DOCUMENTS & SETTINGS\APPLICATION DATA\USERNAME\ALPHA5 VERSION XX where clearly there are no dbf files

    We then tried running the application on the local drive and immediately hit the same problem.

    Normally when deploying an application we simply copy the folder we have created the application in to the target drive either on the local machine or a shared folder on a server.
    We have been doing this for about 15 years without once having a problem.

    Curiously the only way we could get the application to function on the local drive was to use the install builder to create an "application files only" installation and run it on the local drive.
    When we did this the application performed as we would normally expect.
    I find this very strange because as far as I can see the installation exe simply seems to create the folder and unzip the files into it - I assume it only writes to the registry if a full installation including the runtime files is created and deployed. (Note can Alpha confirm exactly what an "application files only" installation does).

    After several hours of trying all sorts of tricks including referencing the target drive by 1) its full UNC path and 2) by including the IP address we were forced to conceed defeat.

    The whole experience confirmed what I have always thought and that is open source software is for geeks and hobbyists and should NEVER be used in a commercial working environment.

    Has anybody else ever seen this behaviour.

    Bob
    Bob Whitaker

    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

    Originally posted by Bob Whitaker View Post
    [B]
    The whole experience confirmed what I have always thought and that is open source software is for geeks and hobbyists.
    Bob
    I think most of the web is built around open source software and guess which one is growing faster desktop or web? I think today all the innovations are coming from open source and then adopted to the commercial software good example is jQuery or Ruby. Without open source we would all still developing desktop applications.

    Comment

      #3
      Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

      Bob,
      I had a client running Samba on a Linux server with alpha5 8 and then 10.5 on ws's, and it ran very fast for several years, without ever once having an issue. Peter Wayne was the first Alpha user that tried Linux, as I recall. He wrote an article on his web page about it - he said the trick is to configure it correctly. In my client's case, they never had an issue. They have since moved to Server2008R2, and I totally have no idea how to set up or configure Linux/Samba. Find his article, and you may get some helpful clues.
      Cole Custom Programming - Terrell, Texas
      972 524 8714
      [email protected]

      ____________________
      "A young man who is not liberal has no heart, but an old man who is not conservative has no mind." GB Shaw

      Comment

        #4
        Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

        hello


        The whole experience confirmed what I have always thought and that is open source software is for geeks and hobbyists and should NEVER be used in a commercial working environment.
        i think php is open source and this forum runs on it.
        mySql was open source till oracle bought it. is that correct?
        thanks for reading

        gandhi

        version 11 3381 - 4096
        mysql backend
        http://www.alphawebprogramming.blogspot.com
        [email protected]
        Skype:[email protected]
        1 914 924 5171

        Comment

          #5
          Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

          mySql was open source till oracle bought it. is that correct?
          As far as I know it still open source.

          We had change 4 years ago from windows to linux server very successfully. BUT we have a server manager in our 2 men IT office. In fact he is an employ with a very good linux knowledge.
          I like windows, he likes linux. Linux is very cheap and there are a lot resource out there in the net. So sometimes we struggle, but finally we know Linux bedder and bedder. At these days we tried to setup a replication server. We tested it Alpha Five without any problems.


          Cornelius

          Comment

            #6
            Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

            fully accept that open source has a place in the computing world and maybe I should have phrased my comment better. From a purely commercial point of view one day spent tinkering and messing about trying to get something "cheap" working totally nullifies any savings you might make.

            Bob
            Bob Whitaker

            Comment

              #7
              Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

              Just a little note here. Red Hat Enterprise is in fact a commercial product and very expensive. But because it is build top of originally open source Linux they also have to give available source code of their product. This source code is distributed under name Centos and it is free .

              Comment

                #8
                Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

                ... and maybe I should have phrased my comment better
                No, I don't think so, everybody knows how frustating it is, when you can't get it to work as you expected. In this forum we share our experience and this is what I am looking for.
                I wanted to motivate you not to give up. Sorry I you misunderstood my post. As I said I prefer Windows. Don't really know what is bedder, but we need to be successfully anyway. Our Linux server is a Suse distribution a certainly not so expensiv as a windows server.

                I would try to take of a client-computer from the net and install a local application. If this worked, connect the client back to to server. May be it was a routing problem.

                Cornelius

                Comment

                  #9
                  Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

                  I am currently running a ubuntu linux with a samba server for other reasons that alpha(there will actually be no alp[ha produxcts developed using this). I will try making a place for the alpha files(desktop) and see how it works out. I hope it will help others in some way.
                  Dave Mason
                  [email protected]
                  Skype is dave.mason46

                  Comment

                    #10
                    Re: A5 + LINUX + SAMBA a cautionary tale

                    I know this is a little late for this post, but if anyone searched for Samba issues it comes up.

                    I had a similar issue with Samba4, every time I tried to edit the structure of a table I would get an error.
                    You can see the full description on my issue in this post: http://msgboard.alphasoftware.com/al...ure-of-a-table

                    When I compared our setup to a colleague's system I discovered the following:
                    in the /etc/fstab on my CentOS server

                    The Alpha5 HDD (/dev/sdd1) was mounted with defaults,acl,user_xattr 00 attributes,
                    /dev/sdd1 /Alpha5 ext4 defaults,acl,user_xattr 0 0

                    when I removed the extended user attributes (user_xattr) and changed the dump pass number, unmounted/remounted the drive, and restarted Samba4 the issue was resolved.
                    /dev/sdd1 /Alpha5 ext4 defaults,acl 0 2

                    The NTFS file permissions were sufficient, but the underlying PAM permissions were set in a way which cause a conflict with Alpha5

                    Samba4 can emulate a Windows AD environment as well as a Win2008R2 I believe.
                    Open source programs pretty much run the internet, programs in Linux repos typically get improvements and bug fixes / patches much faster than closed source programs.

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