I volunteer assistance at several local schools in our rural district and we have been very successful in setting up debian linux-based servers that employ apache, squid, netatalk (for mac file sharing), and samba (for windows file and printer sharing).
This success has lead us to experiment with 'electronic portfolios' in which kids create a multimedia record of things they create over the school year. We are just starting to burn CD's for each of them so they can take their portfolios home (and we can archive their work). However, it looks like we need to allocate .5-1 GB per kid for working storage...2500 kids in 7 schools...200-1000GB per school... Additionally, we have set up a very successful film/video/animation program at the high school which is expanding there and being introduced at lower grades - it has higher per student working storage requirements. At any rate, we want to pilot a debian-based disk farm at the high school, particularly to support the video program in the fall. I am thinking of building a system based on a dual PII BX motherboard, e.g. Supermicro, and then stringing a lot of SCSI disks on it, I guess in 1 or 2 separate enclosures... I would like to use RAID 5, maybe with the raidtools package (?). The system will NOT be used for video capture, instead students will work on local machines and use the server to store and retrieve their current work. I will tweak the network infrastructure accordingly with switches and 100MB links. I'd like this system to handle 100-200GB. Does anyone have any pointers or words of wisdom about this? We are always looking for the cheapest alternative, but management time is expensive and this data is valuable, so I am preferring a BIG SCSI server solution over the herd of smaller IDE-based servers we currently use. Michael Laing -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null