Article
OPEN CALL: We got an inquiry from NUI member Jose Jimenez who writes:
Looking for information on SUSE Linux OES or organizations that are currently using SUSE Linux in their environment.
If you'd like to share your experiences with Jose, post your comments below.
Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).
It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.
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User Comments
SLES10 and OES2
Submitted by tjohnsonlcsd on 8 July 2008 - 1:32pm.
I work for a medium size school district (1000+ staff and 7000+ students, 2200+ PCs and 25+ server) with 8 locations.
We planned to roll out OES2 Linux for next school year but because of time constraints due to an iSCSI SAN project we postponed for a year.
We do use a SLES10 SP1 box (without OES2) for some web apps, network monitoring and chat server and so far we like the platform.
In addition we have a test network made up of 4 SLES10/OES2 boxes running NCS, DNS, iPrint and a couple other apps.
Waiting for OES2 SP1 to test out the AD services feature.
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I switched from be a
Submitted by jmfuge on 9 July 2008 - 11:51am.
I switched from be a consultant/integrator about the time OES 2 came out so I did not have much "play time". I started for a new organization with 300 servers, 256 locations, and over 3000 users. We only have a few SUSE OES 1 boxes, in when I arrived, that I installed as a consultant for this organization.
I had to implement some new dns and zen servers into this environment right away. We decided to go straight to OES 2 to see how it worked. We had a few issues. One with DNS having multiple NICS and getting it to function. The other with SATA RAID drivers from HP on a small server. We fixed that by going to the DL380's. Mostly it has been really easy to setup.
GroupWise and ZEN were easy to install on SUSE. SUSE 10 is very stable and easy to get up and running. If you want iFolder it's there, though I think the enhancements coming in OES 2 SP1 are worth waiting for.
The other Novell Administrator here was really happy at how much better OES 2 (SLES 10) is to administrate and setup. We have added 4 more OES 2 boxes this year and are planning to move the rest of our infrastructure over to is as soon as we can.
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SLES and OES2
Submitted by hobbsc on 9 July 2008 - 12:56pm.
We're currently in the middle of a migration from Server 2003 to SLES and OES2. We're also looking at deploying SLED to most of our user desktops.
We're using GroupWise for mail/calendaring and Apache/Tomcat for web services right on top of the platform.
Our DNS/DHCP is on SLES and we're running several services such as iPrint, NSS, etc.
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SLES10 SP1 and OES2
Submitted by vhquan on 9 July 2008 - 9:46pm.
I'm currently working in company with more than 300 users, now I'm deploying OES2 in SLES10 SP1 platform for some deparments here. I hope I can deploy for hold company (still testing). Anyway I'm very happy with OES2. Our clients use many plaform (XP,Vista and SLED10,OpenSuSe). Now we are using some features from OES(Samba,UniversalPassword,NCP,iPrint,..)
I will try more advance features from OES ;)
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just SLES for now
Submitted by jmarton on 11 July 2008 - 8:11pm.
We are a bond broker/dealer with about 50 users spread over three offices, and we are using SLES10 for a number of things. Our webservers are SLES using IBM WebSphere, our database servers are SLES using MySQL, our internal DNS servers are SLES, and we are running GMS on SLES. Soon we will be migrating from GWGuardian to M+Guardian which is essentially a SLES-based soft appliance (VM). Other than the appliance everything is either at SP2 or slated to be upgraded to SP2.
Hopefully later this year I will move our GroupWise to OES2 once OES2 SP1 comes out, and after that I'll hopefully migrate all other NetWare services to OES2 and then finally retire NetWare in our organization. I also plan on implementing a new OES2 server in an office with no file server at all but instead currently has a simple Linksys NAS device with a USB hard drive. However all the OES2 stuff is still a few months off.
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OES Champion
Submitted by dobarr on 14 July 2008 - 9:00am.
I am the network and communications director for a state prison system. We have been Novell users for 20 years. We migrated entirely to OES Linux not long after the first service pack, and are currently finishing our OES2 upgrade state-wide. We have about 100 servers in 25 locations, including some of the more remote areas of the US. We love OES, especially OES2, and quite frankly, we're surprised so many organizations have not yet made the jump. As a manager responsible for 24x7 operations in a public safety environment, I wouldn't bet on anything else.
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Running SLES 10 and OES 2
Submitted by MRSMITH on 14 July 2008 - 9:10am.
We're a medium-sized K-12 school district with around 6500 students and staff. We are no longer installing any netware. All new server deployments/hardware migrations are running OES2. We already run a lot of SLES 9 and 10, so we're comfortable with Linux. OES 2 has worked very well for us. It's really not that hard to install and configure. My biggest complaint has been no easy migration wizard for going from Netware to OES 2. Supposedly that's going to be addressed with the service pack for OES 2. I really enjoy having a novell file/print server that I can now easily run my choice of non-novell applications on. It's a little mind-boggling to go from Netware which was very limited in its choice of applications to Linux, which can run pretty much anything you need it to.
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SLES and OES
Submitted by stideswe on 22 July 2008 - 8:27pm.
We were a NetWare site using GroupWise, ZEN and BorderManager. We have now fully migrated to OES 1 Linux and are now in the process of migrating to OES 2 Linux. We have about 35 SLES/OES servers.
On the positive side: eDirectory, GroupWise and ZENWorks run very well on OES 1/OES 2. SLES 9 and SLES 10 are very reliable and easy to maintain. Once you have ditched NetWare a whole lot of new possibilities with Open Source software and scripting/automation become possible. You will never harm your reliability and performance by moving to OES Linux for GroupWise, eDirectory and ZEN.
On the downside: the NSS file system on Linux, at least OES 1 Linux, has some serious stability concerns. I think it likely that this is improved in OES 2 but it is too early for me to say. Novell Cluster Services was bad on NetWare, still bad on OES 1 and I don't think it is much better on OES 2. The choice of backup software that supports NSS volumes on Linux is very important - hopefully the choice has widened since we took the plunge a few years ago (2005).
Broadly I am happier on OES Linux (I mean you could scarcely stay on Netware - what a dinosaur!!), but I still think Novell has some way to go to fix up some of the problems.
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