On Mon 02 Jul, Mark Evans wrote:
I thought I might ignore this....but....
200 computers would work fine from one server. There is no need of a server per year group....thats simply rediculous.
There are at least 2 reasons for doing this 1) The most likely "bottleneck" would be the NIC. 2) It's far easier to schedule maintenence where it will only affect one year group at a time.
If a NIC is a bottleneck I would use one of the multiport NICs to seed the main switch - or a Gigabit link, which would be the way to go for the future anyway. I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but.... How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them? And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts.... -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School