Migrating Server 2003 to standalone with a NAS

catmandu

catmandu

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Catmandu
I am the volunteer IT guy at church, no formal training, know just enough to be smarter than everyone else, and I fill in the gaps with Google searches. We have SBS 2003 server box with four XP Pro clients. We have gone from three or so folks working in the office at any one time to just one, occasionally two, with the two never really working on the same thing. The seven year old hardware is starting to 'burp' more and more.

The church office mostly runs Outlook, Publisher, and a church oriented database program. A couple of little programs that bring specific liturgical text and music into Publisher that might have compatibility issues.

A second group in the building shares internet and a network printer, a third group just internet. There is open wireless access.

With a very limited budget, my thought is to get two new machines running Win7 Pro, a NAS box to share files, push DHCP duties back to the router.

And along with this, $60 a month or so to Geek Squad for better troubleshooting advice, especially since I don't plan on being available to take as many 'Hey, there's no internet' calls in the future.

Does it sound like I am heading in the right direction?
 
I ran a Dell Poweredge server with Exchange for years at my house (Huge overkill but I like playing with IT stuff).

About a year ago I finally got tired of it and migrated my domain to google (free, transparent, and much better up time than I can maintain on my own).

Since I was no longer running exchange my need for a full blown server was gone and I went to a ReadyNAS Pro 6.

It is essentially a Linux box with Raid 0/5 and six drive bays.

Fully hot swappable, they have a growth algorithm that allows you to mix and match hard drive types. I.e. you can start with two drives, as space needs increase you simply throw in another drive (whatever size you want) and it will rebuild all your volumes on the fly to take advantage of the increased space. Don't even have to shut the machine down.

I really think for small businesses these little NAS boxes make a lot of sense.

-Dan
 
Also, the ReadyNas Pro line has a pretty beefy Intel chip. It has enough power to transcode HD video in realtime (one of my daughters requirements).

-Dan
 
dweyant said:
Also, the ReadyNas Pro line has a pretty beefy Intel chip. It has enough power to transcode HD video in realtime (one of my daughters requirements).

-Dan
Click to expand...

That is very impressive.

But what does that mean? I always thought of a NAS box being a dumb little file storer and handler; what is "transcode" and how do you make the box do it?
 
What, exactly, are the existing server's roles?

-Rich
 
RJM62 said:
What, exactly, are the existing server's roles?
Click to expand...

From what I can tell (again, just a homebuilder, not an A&P, so to speak), the server keeps track of users and permissions, hands out IP addresses, shares files, and does something with email (nothing email related has ever broken, so I have not really looked into / learned about that, we don't do internal email, just POP3).
 
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SCCutler said:
That is very impressive.

But what does that mean? I always thought of a NAS box being a dumb little file storer and handler; what is "transcode" and how do you make the box do it?
Click to expand...

Let's say you have a bunch of HD movies on your NAS box. There are a number of apps that will allow you to play those movies on various devices. IPhone, IPad, Mac, PC, etc. These devices have (or allow) various resolutions for the display. In order for the media server (NAS Box in this case) to play your video it must change or transcode the video to a resolution the device can handle. This is a fairly CPU intensive activity so most NAS boxes can not do it.

-Dan
 
SCCutler said:
That is very impressive.

But what does that mean? I always thought of a NAS box being a dumb little file storer and handler; what is "transcode" and how do you make the box do it?
Click to expand...

Also, the line between a traditional "Server" and a NAS box has blurred quite a bit in the last couple years. Part of the reason I switched.

I used to have a lot of things on my server, but the NAS boxes started supporting more and more things, to the point that Exchange was the only thing running on my server. Once I decided to kill that I didn't need a true server anymore.

My NAS:
handles videos
schedules and manages backups for all of the house machines (eight at least count)
DHCP server
Web Server
File Management/Storage
Remote Access
Video Surveillance hub
Drop Box Repository
and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few things.

-Dan
 
Agreed. When I briefly shopped little NAS boxes last week, the number of features was impressive. I ended up with an older "dumb" one (Buffalo Linkstation, non-Pro). Many had features like Flickr synchronization, which I never thought I'd see in a NAS box for $200. Drop photos in the NAS or upload to Flickr and they sync. Nifty. Who feels like writing that code? (Not hard, just tedious as hell.)

Under the hood, they're mostly all just low power Atom or Intel embedded Linux boxes. Most of the manufacturers do regular "firmware" updates which are really just new Linux images with more features turned on.

Could I build one myself with a cheap desktop machine? Absolutely. Do I really want to take the time or have some special need to script something that I can't do in a little NAS? Not really for $200.

One thing I noticed is they do seem to all use the XFS file system. Many senior Linux folk might argue that XFS can once in a great while lose data, and not too many Linux admins will use XFS over ext3/4 without a darn good performance reason. But it's a $200 NAS. It blows up, you get to keep both pieces. ;)

Another plus to XFS over some proprietary RAID thing (Drobo, for example) is that I could probably yank one of the RAID 1 drives out of the Buffalo and stick it in a Linux box and attempt data recovery in a pinch.

I think getting out of the volunteer sysadmin business is ALWAYS right, but then again, I get paid to do that stuff so I don't need the cheap competition. :)

Sending them to Geek Squad might be considered asking your poor church mates to meet regularly with Satan, however. Haha.

Every small biz I know using them has been "upsold" to crap they simply didn't need.

If there is a local PC repair small biz with a normal Joe running it and not Best Buy, Inc. - I'd refer them (after talking to the place a bit) to someone like that who's local and while they might upsell stuff too, they're local and actually concerned about their reputation amongst the local small biz community.

And yeah, I'm mildly biased there too. One of my airplane co-owners runs such a shop. Two now, I believe. ;)
 
catmandu said:
From what I can tell (again, just a homebuilder, not an A&P, so to speak), the server keeps track of users and permissions, hands out IP addresses, shares files, and does something with email (nothing email related has ever broken, so I have not really looked into / learned about that, we don't do internal email, just POP3).
Click to expand...

The right NAS can do all of those things except the mail, and possibly assigning the IP addresses. Not all NAS devices have DHCP servers built in. But that's no big deal. The router can do DHCP (although I prefer assigning static IPs to the "regular" machines and just letting the router do DHCP for guest machines on the Wi-Fi).

Setting the permissions may (or may not) be a bit of a chore, depending on the particular NAS. With most of them, it shouldn't be.

I wonder about your database-driven church software, though. Where's that running, how many people need access to it, and will it run properly (or at all) on a Win7 workstation?

It may be possible to install the client and whatever database server software it uses on the machines, and still park the data on an NAS. It really depends on the software. It really shouldn't, in theory, be a big deal. But some proprietary database-driven software I've come across vomits on anything other than whatever it considers a standard installation. Also, a lot of niche software like that is notoriously out-of-date and may not even run on 7.

In any case, I think it will be that software that determines whether the money savings are worth it. I suggest you call the vendor if you can and discuss it with them before running out to buy an NAS.

-Rich
 
I've been a big supporter of NAS devices for years, but recently we've had to back off on recommending them for our clients. The issue is databases... more and more databases are utilizing a client/server architecture. This means an active component must run on the "server", and means you're out-of-luck with the NAS. Even something like Quickbooks wants their database manager to "run" on the Server.
Another potential problem is vertical application support. My experience is that many vendors will shy away from supporting their application in a NAS environment. Their excuse is usually that they can't "test all the units". In their defense, there are a lot of potential little quirks out there, due to the different implementations of Linux and associated utilities.
To be safe, I'd setup a plain-jane Win7 box, as a Server. Add a 2nd hard drive for backup, mirrored or backup on drive to the other. This way, you can also use something like Carbonite for additional backup safety (fire/theft).
+1 on moving the email function to Google Apps.
 
The cheap Buffalo has built in MySQL support. Seriously. I was floored. I haven't tried it yet, but it's built to host a MySQL DB all on its own. Just attach your application to it and load data. Very freaky.
 
CT4ME said:
I've been a big supporter of NAS devices for years, but recently we've had to back off on recommending them for our clients. The issue is databases... more and more databases are utilizing a client/server architecture. This means an active component must run on the "server", and means you're out-of-luck with the NAS. Even something like Quickbooks wants their database manager to "run" on the Server.
Another potential problem is vertical application support. My experience is that many vendors will shy away from supporting their application in a NAS environment. Their excuse is usually that they can't "test all the units". In their defense, there are a lot of potential little quirks out there, due to the different implementations of Linux and associated utilities.
To be safe, I'd setup a plain-jane Win7 box, as a Server. Add a 2nd hard drive for backup, mirrored or backup on drive to the other. This way, you can also use something like Carbonite for additional backup safety (fire/theft).
+1 on moving the email function to Google Apps.
Click to expand...

I agree that the databases are indeed the problem, especially when dealing with proprietary, niche software. This is the result of poor programming more than anything else, in my opinion. There's really no good reason why the data source should have to reside on the same partition, machine, continent, or planet as the database server.

But my biggest complaint has always been niche software for particular industries, whose vendors are notoriously slow to update their software. When I left the tech support business, I had a couple of clients who were still running Windows XP on their workstations and Windows 2000 on their servers because the industry-specific software that they paid through the nose to use wouldn't run on anything newer.

I even had one client, an auto mechanic, who was paying an annual support fee for antiquated software that still ran on DOS. It was being served from an old Window 95 machine. The client called me from the Yellow Pages when the Win95 machine croaked. This was back in maybe 2002. I built them a Linux server, recovered the data, and ran the program on DOSEMU.

When the software vendor died a few years later (it was a one-man operation), the software became unsupported, which really didn't make a difference as he hadn't updated it in at least a decade, anyway. Or at least we thought it wouldn't make a difference -- until the dongles started dying. The licenses were embedded on parallel port dongles, and when the dongles started dying, there was no one to provide replacements.

After considering, and then rejecting, the idea of trying to reverse-engineer one of the remaining working dongles, the guy who bought my business eventually found SomeOtherGuy who was able to migrate the data out of the old program into something from this century.

-Rich
 
Thanks all for the input. I suppose looking into my 'niche' software for Win7 and NAS compatibility is a good first step.
​
 
This sounds like you're walking into a disaster. First things first, never let GeekSquad touch a server. Ever ever ever ever ever. Ever! I wouldn't let them touch a workstation either unless you want Windows reinstalled.

We used to support a church. Expect that donations software to run in SQL, probably SQL Express 2005.

Plan on pulling all the workstations off of the domain. Make sure you create a local admin account on each one first or reset the password on the local admin account.

If you think that server does something with email, but you're using POP, I would check to see if they are using Exchange, hopefully not, but possibly using the Exchange POP3 connector. This is most likely the part that is going to ruin your day.
 
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