Topic: Serving Windows Apps

[Steve]

I am looking at replacing our LAN's NT 4.0 server with e-smith. The server currently serves applications (as well as files) - to NT 4.0 client machines.
Does anyone have experience with this?
Will this require a separate NT machine on the network?

Steve

[laurent]

i have  change our Small Business Server 4.5 by an e-smith server.
at this day, we haven't problems with our application or our files. The big problem was Exchange Server (calandar and shared folders) . I change the original imap server by a courier-imap server  (for shared folders).

[ralph]

Hi Steve,

depends whether you are ( ore where ) serving apps off your NT box ( e.g. from a fileshare ) or on the box ( mail, database .... ).

For scenario Nr. 1 ( off ) there should not be any prob at all. Nr. 2 ...

cheers,

Ralph

[Steve]

Thanks, Ralph., but I don't think we understand each other...

My NT server which serves the network is also the file server and the apps server.

There is one server which does everything: connects the client machines, serves the files, and runs the apps.

The 9 client machines run NT4.0 and IE6.0. Nothing else. The have no apps.

There is no box on the LAN doing anything other than one of the above.

The server serves everything It has MS Office installed. When users launch Winword, the program runs on the server. If necessary, multiple instances of Winword are accessed on the users' machines simultaneously. There is no apparent slowdown in client machines. Even older, slower machines access Photoshop which runs on the server.

Will e-smith do this? How?

Steve

[guestHH]

Hi,

As long as you do not use specific NT server applications it is no problem.
In your case the apps are just stored on the server waiting to be picked up by the clients to run them on the local machine.

Regards,
guestHH

[Ray Mitchell]

Steve

It depends on your applications. Are they designed to run on Linux ?

I had a problems with multi user applications that were installed on a sme 4.1.2 and 5.1.2 server and run across the network on each workstation. Index errors were being generated as the applications were predominantly databases. The best I could determine was that Samba's emulation of Windows file sharing was not good enough (compatible) and file locking problems were occurring. After some discussion with the program designers they suggested using a Win 2000 box to serve these applications from. I tried that and no more problems. In the most recent release the software programmers now state that they do not support Linux server installations, only Win 2000 and various versions of Netware.

So my present setup is a sme 5.1.2 box as a PDC doing email, web and print serving and the Win2000 Pro box as a application and file server.

I guess if you are not running multi user applications you may not experience the problems that I did.

Regards
Ray Mitchell

[ralph]

Hi Steve,

o.k., now that I've got you, I strongly agree to RequestedDeletion's statement.

In your case, office does NOT run on the server but gets loaded from the server to the local machine ( clients ) running right there.

Abstacted it's nothing else but fileserving from a different point of view and should work on SME ( well, depending on the office version you intend to use ).

br, ciao,

Ralph