Best server for a mixed OSX/Windows environment

So I'm the unofficial IT guy for our workgroup within a larger corporation.

For corporate reasons, we are required to use a very clumsy, web based file sharing tool. It's a complete pain, very slow, severely limited in storage capacity, and requires individual permissions to be constantly tweaked.

For the past 3 years we have been a purely Windows environment, so we have an old Windows XP box tied to an external RAID 5 drive that we set up to share files. It works fine for most of our needs. Lots of storage, we can limit the file access to only our team using the user ID's on the corporate domain, and performance has been good enough.

In the past 2 months we rolled out a bunch of Mac's, and what I've found is connecting to the machine is incredibly slow. After researching it seems this is just an issue with SMB 1.0 and the fact that the Mac users work off-site so they have to VPN in to get access to the network. A ~20 meg file takes minutes and that's after updating some of the SMB settings that people have recommended.

So the next question is if I'm going to start upgrading what would be the best course:

1 - Just upgrade the existing server to Windows 7 or Windows Server?

2 - Upgrade to Linux (I'd like to avoid this mainly because I have no good experience with Linux in the past 15 years and I'm not sure if there will be any gotchas, but if it's the best approach I'll consider it if theres a Distro that is easy enough to setup).

3 - Upgrade to a Mac with OSX Server (OSX seems to at least play fairly nice with our corporate domain)

Any suggestions on what will be easiest and offer the best performance for both camps? Assume budget is not an issue, I can buy whatever hardware/software I need, but from my own experience I'm primarily a Windows guy with a little Mac experience and very little Linux. Also I'm not actually the IT guy, I'm just the only one who knows enough to try and address the issue.

Any help would be appreciated.

Option 1: Windows Server, setup AD. Macs can SMB into it just fine. I'd look into upgrading the actual server itself and depending on how the RAID5 is setup, upgrading to a real NAS setup. Try to sell the long term benefits (faster = more productivity, better quality hardware = less downtime, etc)

Option 2: Wouldn't do it if you have no experience with Linux Server setup but easiest on the cost

Option 3: With apple discontinuing the XServe I'd highly recommend against it.

I read the issue with SMB was tied to Finder, where the OS itself had updated SMB. I didn't have any definitive speed improvements using an alternate finder; YMMV.
centOS may be the best compromise, my other choice would be Windows Server. Be aware with Windows you need to use pre-2000 authentication and LANMAN v1 so the Macs can authenticate.

Budget?

1. Make sure the macs are running an updated version of the OS. OSX implemented a new implementation of CIFS/SMB around 10.7, this has been corrected somewhat in the later releases.

2.Set up a Windows 7 PC to see how they play with the newer NTLM/CIFS version. If that works out, move to 2008 R2 or 2012 essentials. I'd look at getting a technet subscription to test out different server OS's before pulling the trigger on the OS. The standard technet subscription should allow you to test out the OS's before shelling out the cash.

Budget: Anything under $10k is fine, but honestly right now we're running off a single core P4 Dell workstation that has completely held up to the workload.

The Macs are brand new, so they're not on an old version of OSX.

I think I will take the suggestion about just trying it with a Windows 7 machine purely to see how the connection speeds are with the newer file system. Since it's a very small network share and it's purely about sharing files (no need for any other hosted services) then it may be easy to pull off.

I'll try that first and see how it works for them to see how much of the issue is being caused by the OS.

I would just buy a nice NAS (synology or equivalent) and share folders to both mac and PC there. If you are not worried about having them log into a domain or anything just stop with that. If you are wanting all of your users to log in to a managed environment then buy two small AD servers and have both mac and PCs use that for authentication, DNS, and DHCP.

You might want to check out Zentyal it is the equivalence of a Windows Small Business Server only it runs on Linux instead and supports Unix, Linux, and windows environments.

I have only ran this in a test environment but it works pretty well, it also has a very easy interface to use.

Cyberdemon said:

they have to VPN in to get access to the network. A ~20 meg file takes minutes and that's after updating some of the SMB settings that people have recommended.

Click to expand...

A 20 meg file will take naturally minutes to upload when the users are working through VPN and low speed DSL lines. VPN will eat a chunk of the already puny upload bandwith. Did you already exclude this as a sole possibility for the slowness?

B00nie said:

A 20 meg file will take naturally minutes to upload when the users are working through VPN and low speed DSL lines. VPN will eat a chunk of the already puny upload bandwith. Did you already exclude this as a sole possibility for the slowness?

Click to expand...

Yes. Side by side a PC and Mac in the same building, connected over a guest Wifi to the VPN and connecting to the server is a night and day difference. The PC will transfer the file in a few seconds, the Mac is taking minutes just to begin the transfer process. This is also for downloads over a high bandwidth connection. It'll pull 50mbps down from most servers.

Keep in mind this being setup within a large (Fortune 300) company. The company already has a corporate domain, DNS, and everything else taken care of.

The company IT does provide a tool for this type of thing, it just sucks. They will also setup a server for us, but the capacity and performance is also rather poor, and we have to pay a sizable monthly fee for the "privilege". Managing the existing Windows server for our small team allows us to ensure privacy of the data, we don't have to pay anyone any fees, and a lot less red tape.

I may have another issue though...I setup a share on the Windows 7 server and it looks like people in a certain office can't even access it. I have a feeling the ISP in that office is blocking the SMB port since they can ping the server just fine while VPN'ed in, but not get any shares going through.

You could setup a FreeNAS. If you already have AD you can set FreeNAS to with against it. It supports CIFS and AFP, so you could not bother with CIFS/SMB on the macs. I have been having some issues making AFP author against ADS, but the research I've done on the issue leads me to believe it's a flaw in my config rather than a bug in FreeNAS.