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Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 R2


Good


• Relatively easy upgrade from 2003 SP1
• Nice additions to file services
• Replication for restricted bandwidth connections


Bad


• Some useful components not installed by default
• Problems with File Screen functionality
• Storage Reports do not support NAS devices

Windows Server 2003 r2 enterprise edition, free to Software Assurance Enterprise Edition licensees. Microsoft, (800) 642-7676. www.microsoft.com/a>

The NFS server functionality is supposed to let you use NFS shares on Windows servers and access Windows disks from Unix machines. I configured the test system as a Windows server, and then tried to gain access from one of our Red Hat Linux servers. As might be expected, you are required to "map" between UNIX and Windows users, but the user-mapping component is not installed by default. You must install User Name Mapping separately from running the NFS services installation.

So I configured user-name mapping myself. I also set anonymous access and made user account names exactly the same on both the Windows and UNIX servers. This worked fine--sort of. I was able to mount the Windows share, but was unable to read from or write to it, even with anonymous access on. Server for NFS Authentication is required when local machine accounts (as opposed to domain accounts) are being mapped to UNIX accounts, but Server for NFS Authentication is not part of the default installation. Once all the pieces are installed, NFS works well, so be sure you install these components if you're not using an alternative name-mapping solution.

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