Over the next month or two I need to set up a server for my old secondary school to provide user storage for all the pupils.
There are just over 800 kids at the school, so I guess a total of about 1Tb of storage would be sensible. Currently the school is about half Acorn and half Windows, but the Acorns are being phased out in favour of new Windows machines - although they might be new Linux machines if I can make the school see sense :-). Clearly the storage requirements for the Windows software is
I'm currently investigating running Windows apps using an LTSP setup. I have been quoted a price of USD 55.99 (per station) from NeTraverse for the Win4Lin server product. Even if you still need to buy multiple Windows licences the fact that you can cut down on the hardware specs more than make up for this.
of a different order of magnitude to the Acorn stuff, so 1Gb per child does not seem overly generous to me.
I give them about 20M and only increase it for those who actually need it. Even using Windows apps they will have a hard time filling up 1G. You also need to work out how on earth you are going to back this lot up.
So to the question:
I'm happy setting up Linux as a Samba server to do this lot, but does anyone have experience/advice on choice of hardware for the job (I'm happy to build a machine from bits). RAID is a must, but IDE gives us a lot more Mb for our money than SCSI, but maybe at the cost of performance/reliability? Nevertheless, it seems to me that even a modest hard disc can outperform the 100MHz ethernet to which the server will be connected.
In practice ethernet can often be faster than a HDD, since the quoted figures for HDD's tend to be burst, rather than sustained transfer rates. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763