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 -- Phil Driscoll
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
On Thursday 28 June 2001 10:57, Mark Evans wrote:
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.
Sadly I beleive some proprietary nonsense has to go off on both machines. Rest assured, if it doesn't need to be windows it won't be :-) -- Phil Driscoll
On Thursday 28 June 2001 10:57, Mark Evans wrote:
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.
Sadly I beleive some proprietary nonsense has to go off on both machines. Rest assured, if it doesn't need to be windows it won't be :-)
Mutually incompatable "proprietary nonsense" or can you make do with one machine doing both? -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
On Thursday 28 June 2001 13:08, Mark Evans wrote:
Mutually incompatable "proprietary nonsense" or can you make do with one machine doing both? Not incompatible, but the language lab server will be kept extremely busy serving up a variety of streaming media to its 30 clients.
Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
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
200 computers would work fine from one server. There is no need of a server per year group....thats simply rediculous.
The fact is that initially all the computers will work off one server, since we don't have the cash to do any better, however I don't think it's as ridiculous as you suggest. It can distribute the load across network segments and, since the server won't (can't!) actually be any faster than my desktop machine, and I can easily saturate the hard disk IO on my own machine when working on various multimedia things, I'm sure that 200 kids doing not quite such adventurous stuff should be able to make a big dent in the performance of the machine.
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.
The point in the language lab is that the proprietary language software has to serve up multiple channels of streaming media to it's 30 machines. I think that would take a big chunk out of the available performance of that box, and leave the rest of the school poorly served when that machine was busy - if it was the only server.
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.
I don't plan to use NT as a domain controller unless someone can come up with a good reason as to why I should.
Disc access/speed is OTOH criticial and UW2 fast spin SCSI drives are essential - ideally in RAID configuration.
I think that multiple servers running IDE RAID and loads of RAM will give me far more bang for my buck than a single machine with SCSI storage.
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)
We already have a fairly elderly machine doing the proxy job, but it is more than capable of coping with the 2Mb line which is supposed to arrive real soon now honest. The authority provides and manages webmail for all staff and students so we don't need to provide for it. Since I originally posted the school has scrounged nearly 200 bare machines (200MHz PII) so the network load has just gone up, but I suspect the days of the Acorn machinery (especially the pre Risc PC machines) are numbered. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
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.
There are at least 2 reasons for doing this 1) The most likely "bottleneck" would be the NIC. 2) It's far easier to schedule maintenence where it will only affect one year group at a time. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
200 computers would work fine from one server. There is no need of a server per year group....thats simply rediculous.
The fact is that initially all the computers will work off one server, since we don't have the cash to do any better, however I don't think it's as ridiculous as you suggest. It can distribute the load across network segments and, since the server won't (can't!) actually be any faster than my desktop machine, and I can easily saturate the hard disk IO on my own machine when working on various multimedia things, I'm sure that 200 kids doing not quite such adventurous stuff should be able to make a big dent in the performance of the machine.
Whatever the hardware it's not going to do more than 100M *bits* you could use multiple NICS, but this complicates the planning. Especially if your network is complicated.
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.
The point in the language lab is that the proprietary language software has to serve up multiple channels of streaming media to it's 30 machines. I think that would take a big chunk out of the available performance of that box, and leave the rest of the school poorly served when that machine was busy - if it was the only server.
It might be slightly easier with 29 machines, 1 network printer, 1 multi-midia server and 1 connection to the rest of the network. Which fits nicely onto a 32 port switch.
Since I originally posted the school has scrounged nearly 200 bare machines (200MHz PII) so the network load has just gone up, but I suspect the days of
Where were you able to scrounge these from? -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
On Mon 02 Jul, Mark Evans wrote:
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.
There are at least 2 reasons for doing this 1) The most likely "bottleneck" would be the NIC. 2) It's far easier to schedule maintenence where it will only affect one year group at a time.
If a NIC is a bottleneck I would use one of the multiport NICs to seed the main switch - or a Gigabit link, which would be the way to go for the future anyway. I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but.... How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them? And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts.... -- Alan Davies Head of Computing Birkenhead School
On Mon 02 Jul, Mark Evans wrote:
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.
There are at least 2 reasons for doing this 1) The most likely "bottleneck" would be the NIC. 2) It's far easier to schedule maintenence where it will only affect one year group at a time.
If a NIC is a bottleneck I would use one of the multiport NICs to seed the main switch - or a Gigabit link, which would be the way to go for the future anyway.
You would also need a rather sophisticated switch, more of a "concentrator".
I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but....
How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them?
And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts....
I don't see why this should be a big, indeed any kind of a problem. Maybe it would be if you tried in with NT... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Mark Evans wrote:
I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but.... How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them? And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts.... I don't see why this should be a big, indeed any kind of a problem. Maybe it would be if you tried in with NT...
Indeed. If you don't have all this sort of thing automated, then you're doing it wrong. Just package up all your customisations into a single RPM and you can duplicate it to as many machines as you like. The "fensystems-customisations" RPM means that, for me, installing and configuring a server is a case of inserting a boot floppy and then coming back half an hour later to log in and test it. Of course, it takes about three times as long to automate something as it does to just do it once, but unless you're planning on never using more than three computers... Michael
On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Mark Evans wrote:
I accept what you say in principle about maintenance (and I'm not sure that is is ever a perfect time) - but.... How would you cope when pupils moved from year to year - would the server move with them? And if so - you would then need all the setup you carefully performed the year before repeated on the next year server so that have all the links and shortcuts.... I don't see why this should be a big, indeed any kind of a problem. Maybe it would be if you tried in with NT...
Indeed. If you don't have all this sort of thing automated, then you're doing it wrong. Just package up all your customisations into a single RPM and you can duplicate it to as many machines as you like. The "fensystems-customisations" RPM means that, for me, installing and configuring a server is a case of inserting a boot floppy and then coming back half an hour later to log in and test it.
You don't even need anything as exotic as RPM, an NFS mount with cp -a will duplicate a machine easily.
Of course, it takes about three times as long to automate something as it does to just do it once, but unless you're planning on never using more than three computers...
Try convincing the people who sell Windows programs though... -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763
participants (4)
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Alan Davies -
Mark Evans -
Michael Brown -
Phil Driscoll