On Friday 18 May 2001 1:10 pm, you wrote:
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 of a different order of magnitude to the Acorn stuff, so 1Gb per child does not seem overly generous to me.
For our 1600 plus sixth form we give 40 or 80Mb for lower school and 80Mb for year 11 & up with individual increases in the 6th form. 1G id more than I've got on the users server!
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.
Have you looked at www.bpbatch.org for thin clients served from Linux? I haven't really looked at Win4Lin but do use VMWare - there are some better apps coming out now that many vendors are going web-delivered.
You also need to work out how on earth you are going to back this lot up.
Here, here. "Even" students deserve to have their work protected.
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
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.
Agreed, and SCSI must be better than IDE because of the constant use. IDE is OK for home (I suppose - but think how often folk trash their HDDs!) but I would only use IDE for a low-profile server in a working environment. Specially if you think you can run to 1Tb per student! -- Best wishes, Derek Harding, (BA MIAP) ICT & Network Manager, Warlingham School hardingd@warlingham.surrey.sch.uk