I'd like to say, there's spending money wisely, and then being so cheap that
it shoots you in the foot. Get good equipment. Im a CNE, and my whole
network is comprised of Dell Servers and originally 3Com switches (not the
$50 8-port jobbies) now moved to Cisco. There are two ideas for server
stability. Is the software stable? Will the OS crash, either on its own or
because of a run-away app? Or, will the server hardware fail? You can't
predict the software crash althought you can take steps to prevent it such
as rebooting every once in a while (My netware servers at work go about a
year before a reboot.)
Another idea is a mix of the School-1 and School-2 that Julius wrote about
before. Have different littler-servers, but spread the running apps &
services between the servers. Have a seperate backup server, a seperate
LTSP-server, a seperate mail server and a seperate Apps-server. One reason
for this is you'll be able to reboot any machine without affecting the
performance of the other servers. You can work on one physical machine
without affecting services of the others. It also contains problems in the
event of a crash or hardware failure.
Also, consider the Dell equipment. It is a little more expensive, but you
get enterprise-class support for 3 years. If a drive dies, you'll have a
new one next-day aired to you the next day. You can't avoid a hardware
failure, but you can ensure you get the parts you need speedily.
Dave
**************************
Morten,
do yourself a huge favor and look up the K12Ltsp aka K12OS at
<http://www.k12os.org>
they have just what you need; a full distribution based on rh7.2
and ltsp 3.0 meant for use in the schools! it is awesome! and it works
right out of the box.
as to what you need for server(s), there are 2 schools of thought.
1 says "many little servers, if one fails, it is not a disaster". school 2
says "any filure is a disaster to the administrator and one big
"DEPENDABLE" server is better and cheaper than many small ones. both
approches have merit. from my experience with systems big and small i
learned that one server per geographical location works best for high
bandwidth application, everything else is better done on a single big
server. more to a point, i've run single server for 3000+ users with >no<
that is 0 downtime in 1.5 years and i've run setups with 9 servers for 50
users with lots of downtime. server quality rules. as to the load: a
single 4 processor 1GHz or better with at least 4GB should be adequate
provided that not all 160 users hit various applications at the same time.
i would go for more memory first, more processors second and more speed
third. good luck, and really look up the k12os distribution. julius
On Tue, 5 Mar 2002, morten wrote:
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