Koozali.org: home of the SME Server

A rough beginning with a happy ending

Offline MSmith

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A rough beginning with a happy ending
« on: April 10, 2005, 02:41:07 PM »
About three years ago I set up a Dell server for a graphic design/signprinting company using SME 5.5 w/software RAID in server-only mode.  All was well until they started moving to Windows XP; certain specialized apps did not like pulling files from the SME Server and file access from XP seemed sluggish relative to 98.

So this weekend I figured I'd upgrade the machine to 6.01-01 (can't wait any longer for 6.5 or 7.0 for this project, sadly).  Knowing from experience that going from 5.5 directly to 6.01 can introduce problems, I had my old 5.6 CD handy.

EVERY time the upgrade failed at "Error installing net-tools-1.60".  Two different CD drives and a quick download of the ISO & new CD didn't help, nor did trying a jump directly to 6.01.

So, having the time and knowing there was a full mirror of the server's contents (thanks to XXCOPY) on a workstation, I used the Lazy Admin tools (thanks Michiel Blotwijk), wiped the machine & installed 6.01-01 from scratch.  I then updated Samba to version 3.0.7 (thanks Greg Zartman, I know it's still beta but it works great so far) and installed the Advanced Workgroup contrib (thanks jprice) in case I needed to fiddle with oplocks.  

This setup fixed all the XP issues encountered thus far, and two users commented that file access seemed noticeably quicker.

So ... a small success story and another big win for SME!
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