Sounds to me that you may be opening yourself up to all kinds of problems. You say you have no experience with Linux... I would stay away from it if you are not extremely familiar with it - especially with that many clients.

Even if you do get it to run, I would bet that you will get no assistance from Microsoft if you have problems with it.

You are still going to have to make the investment in hardware for new servers... why not take that and buy a bigger Novell box? There is no reason a Novell server should "crash at least 1 per month". Novell is a stable file server OS. Most of the problems I have seen with Novell have to do with the hardware it is running on.

Wayne

>I have a Costumer that wants to look for a less expensive platform to host they VFP databases.
>Now they have their DBF's tables in a Novel Server and the clients, 900 aprox. access them througth WIN 95 in a LAN, and throught Metaframe (thin-cliente) to their WAN.
>The file server crash at least 1 per month (file read error or file write error), because there is only one netware server.
>So, they want to have 3 Netware servers, 300 user per server, but the cost of de licence it's not simple.
>Because of that, I have the simple idea to put their DBF in three Linux server (or two, or one).
>I have been search for information on this, but a prefer to share with you if someone has done this before.
>My experience in Linux is very short... I've seen that there is a software called SAMBA that make a Linux server act like a File Server like Windows NT and is transparent for Windows clients.
>Other cuestion is, if the system is quiet stable.
>
>Wel, I hope you can help me on this.
>
>Thanks.