I’m the admin of a noncommercial radiostation in germany. I don’t get any money for my job. However i’m looking for an upgrade of 3 SME V 8 + 9 systems.
What they need.
Usermanagment for up to 30 user with a domain controller.
OS are Windows XP, Win 7 and Win 10. No other DC
Fileserver
No Mail/Groupware
No printer
Maybe a VPN to share files between the three locations.?!
Would it be a good idea to migrate from sme to nethserver.?
SME 8 is long since EOL, so you should definitely move that to something current, whether it be SME 9 or NS7.
On the question of limitations, there really aren’t any. A subscription gives you access to the “stable” repositories–there’s a delay of a week or so in pushing updates to that repo to give an additional chance for issues to be spotted and fixed. There are no limits on users or capabilities with the non-subscription version.
I suggest you to migrate from SME server to NG (I have many installation and they aren’t comparable with SME server - it’s obsolete in my opinion).
If u can accept some hours of down (due a rare bugs in repositories) or if u can wait community answers to solve a problem you can work also without subscriptions. If u can’t, I suggest you to open a subscription contract.
I suggest, also, you to migrate to 7NG to have a Active Directory DC and for VPN you can configurate IPsec Net2Net or OpenVPN tunnel and connect two or more locations.
For me i have to check the old systems to get info about diskspace, users etc… First i will setup @ home a testsystem. The only problem is, that there are no windows clients available to test if they can join to the DC / AD. As i told, i need to check if all clients from XP to 10 can connect.
I think you are aware that WinXP is a long gone OS too. It might be a good idea to get things going to replace those pc’s for something a tad newer…
If there is no money for new hardware, just try to collect some core2duo/quad or first edition Core i3/i5 pc’s from companies that decommissioned those, I have done this in the past for a primary school. If you are willing to spend some time I am certain you will find some betteer pc’s than you have now that run WinXP, so you can put them to Win7 or Win10. (or just install an easy-to-use linux distro… )
There are quite a few community members that migrated from SME to NethServer. Do read the mentioned page in our wiki for migration. Also don’t hesitate to ask in these forums if you are uncertain of a specific step in the migration. We are here to help.