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,
Somewhat different fro the way I do things, but maybe you have softer walls so centralising everything is easier.
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 would make sense to use 10/100M switches, these will work fine with the Acorns and mean that if you change machines you won't need to change any part of the network.
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.
Why do you need separate servers here and why do they need to be NT/2000? If all they need to do is file and print sharing then SMABA will serve any Windows machines. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763