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. And seeing as you seem to need NT/2000 servers for language lab et al then this/these may as well be for the whole school. I would _strongly_ recommend a PDC/BDC pair as if one should fail its easy to rebuild a new server from scratch and add it to the existing domain. If you've ever tried to recover a domain server on different(new) hardware from the original that failed then you'll know what I mean. If the PDC is doing netlogon/profiles/homedir then the BDC could easily be proxy as well. We use such a configuration with over 150 PC stations and the processaor load (2x350Mhz, 256MB ram) is rarely over 10%. Disc access/speed is OTOH criticial and UW2 fast spin SCSI drives are essential - ideally in RAID configuration. I'm sure the whole lot - including the NT domain could equally well be served by a LINUX box (even a single box...) although I would be inclibed to run the Email/proxy on a separate box (even if I was using NT) Make sure that the Acorn stations are running 10Mhz from a switching hub back to the server. I assume you use omniclient for these. Do you run a CITRIX server to allow these stations to access MS applications too? I will be interested in seeing how LINUX for all works out. I guess the free rdp client would come in handy if you have a NT terminal server (or Win2000 server). On Wed 27 Jun, Phil Driscoll wrote:
Hi
Can anyone point me to some good reference material on network design? Alternatively, thoughts on the matter are most welcome!
The story so far (approximately) is that we have about 200 network points wired with CAT 5 most of which come through to racks in the server room, although a couple of remote areas (language lab and D&T dept.) have their own racks with fibre to the server room. Broadband (well a 2Mb circuit anyway) will arrive at the school RSN. Of the 200ish computers about 50 are Acorn on 10M network cards and the rest are PCs on 100M cards. There are essentially 5 IT suites including the language lab accounting for about 3/4 of the machines, the remainder are in small groups (1 to 5ish) in classrooms. I hope that we can persuade the powers that be to let us have the majority of the PCs running Linux, although a language lab and a 'success maker' lab will have to run Windoze.
You may remember from an earlier posting that we plan to have one Linux server for each year group which will handle pupil storage and login. A further machine will be a proxy, and separate NT/2000 servers are required for the language lab and success maker room.
What yeargroup is using what set of machines at a given time can be considered as random for the purpose of this exercise.
So the issues for us to resolve (since the wiring is already in and will not be changed) are things like switch configurations, where to logically site the servers and so on.
Cheers
-- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School