> > All users are configured to use 'roaming profiles';

> You really want to avoid this in a school environment. It has several

> problems. 1) wastage of bandwidth. 2) data protection issues WRT what

> may end up being stored on workstations, 3) it is indeterminate what

> will happen when the same user logs into more than one workstation

> "Folder Redirection" is a far better way to do things IMHO.

I can testify to this, from our experience with a similar sized academic network (400 PCs, 1300 users, give or take.) We used to run profiles under 98 more or less okay, a few odd issues but they were solved by deleting the profile, and getting them to log into a workstation with a valid default profile. Main arguments for using profiles were a) curriculum requirements, and b) access requirements. Students needed to be able to configure their desktop, and office applications, to their preferences as part of Key Skills (IIRC?), and also people with any visual difficulty needed to be able to set the screen resolution. We upgraded our workstations to Win2k a couple of years ago, (XP over the last summer) and still maintained profiles. The huge benefits of the Win2k workstations came in the usual manner, Novell let us set very tight, but not restrictive, user profiles. Our support demands dropped rapidly. Shortly after the year started people started complaining that log in was taking a long time. None of the support team noticed it, but then we never logged in at the start of a lesson. We also noticed server disk space was getting eaten up rather rapidly, but couldn't find the usual suspects (large JPG or PSD files.) Log in times escalated to the region of 5~10 minutes, and similar for logging out. Then we noticed the user profiles on everyones drives. There was barely a directory smaller than 70mb, even though the profiles were locked down on what they stored. At the start (and end) of every period, we'd have anywhere up to 300 odd workstations logging in and trying to grab 80mb of user profile each. It was hardly surprising that logins were taking so long.

Shortly afterwards we turned user profiles off and instantly a whole slew of network performance issues were resolved. Now we won't even consider turning them on, regardless of any arguments raised. We just subtly remind them of what the network was like a couple of years ago. Either that or if they still protest we put them into what BOFH calls 'Dummies mode' by chucking a load of technical descriptions at them :-)

> E-mail client POP-3 and / or IMAP [...suggestions please?]

Thunderbird, as mentioned previously, or Evolution maybe. Evolution gives you all the usual Outlook style facilities such as contact management, calendar etc.

> Remote config & management tools [...suggestions please?]

If you're running Linux workstations you can connect using either SSH or Telnet and get it to pass the remote server information to your workstations X windows gui, giving you full control over the server, as if you were sitting at the machine. I've never done this myself, I'll confess, but I do know lots of people regularly do this and that its reportedly quite easy to do. It should be fairly easy to find an on-line FAQ for this somewhere. In conjuction with a properly setup Cygwin you could even get your servers X windows screen up on a Windows box. It does also, theoretically, provide you the option to manage your servers over the internet from your home machine... although I probably wouldn't recommend leaving any way for someone even the slightest possible way to break in to your system like that.

Two product names that spring to mind are Webmin and Linuxconf, although again I have no personal experience of using them.

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