“Many enterprises have tried the Microsoft solution in the
past few years, either because of financial incentives or because
of management pressures, and many are now having major problems
dealing with the NT platform, and would like to move to a more
stable, reliable, and less expensive solution. In this article
I will picture a case study of a small company migrating from a
Windows NT Server network to a Linux one.”
“The company I will be picturing here has 20 desktops using
Pentium processors and running Windows 95 and Windows 98, and one
server using a 486DX chip and barely running Windows NT, with
several IDE drives and 2 printers. Because changing the whole
network in one shot is a bad idea, and because employees are used
to the Windows system, we will leave the desktops untouched and
concentrate on the server side. In this migration, the goal is to
improve the performance in a way that is visible from the desktops,
at a very low cost.”
“The first step is to backup the documents on the server. Then
the physical server will need to be replaced to improve the
performance, and Linux will be installed to improve stability and
lower costs. The new system will then need to support sharing of
files and of the two printers.”