Can anyone point me to some good reference material on network design? Alternatively, thoughts on the matter are most welcome!
I don't know what precise grade of cabling you have installed, nor which apps, but if your main switch works at 100 M, you may have a bottleneck. We have done things a bit differently as we have lots of separate buildings, we have fibre running at 1 Gb, and switches within buildings providing 100/10. Very little cat 5 at the server end. If you use Office applications and store files on the network; if you load bloatware from a server, if you allow media on the network, I think 100 M will not be enough bandwidth. If the servers are connected to the main switch at 1 Gb, the fibre at 1 Gb and the cat 5 at 10/100 for stations, it'll probably work. 1 Gig switch modules still cost serious money compared with 10/100. You can segment network traffic by using departmental switches, so if Mod Lang want media onto their stations, none of that will hit the main switch at all. I assume that's one reason why you're talking about a server for them specifically. Their switch would logically reside at the departmental end of the fibre segment, along with their server. If configured appropriately, no-one outside Mod Land need know that their server is there. I read the comment about SAMBA. It's pretty good at looking like an NT/2000 server but it doesn't do everything a pukka Microsoft server will. I guess if you are installing a specific product the suppliers may only wish to support it if it's on the correct platform? Do you have money to get a consultant in for a day? I would REALLY recommend it. -- ******************************************************************************** All mail sent and received may be examined to prevent transmission of inappropriate attachments and certain obscenities. Wellington College does not accept responsibility for email contents. Problems to postmaster@wellington-college.berks.sch.uk. ********************************************************************************