We are a school with Language College status and desperately need to upgrade/supplement our existing server. We run an NT4 raid server, with only 1GB of free space (from 37.5GB available), CD Server (Avantis-not set up properly, due to supply of 'faulty s/w', Avantis only want £200 for s/w that works), with a mix of win95/98 workstations, (approx 130). Which ever solution we opt for, it will have to be reliable and be maintained by 2 technicians whose enthusiasm far exceeds their knowledge (at the moment, but they are learning, quickly). Suggestions please??? Mark Presley Holy Family Catholic School Keighley
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 03 Jan 2002 03:58 am, Mark Presley wrote:
We are a school with Language College status and desperately need to upgrade/supplement our existing server.
We run an NT4 raid server, with only 1GB of free space (from 37.5GB available), CD Server (Avantis-not set up properly, due to supply of 'faulty s/w', Avantis only want £200 for s/w that works), with a mix of win95/98 workstations, (approx 130).
Which ever solution we opt for, it will have to be reliable and be maintained by 2 technicians whose enthusiasm far exceeds their knowledge (at the moment, but they are learning, quickly).
Suggestions please???
To talk to Windows clients, you'd need to use Samba. If you so want, you can set it to authenticate users as well. "man smb.conf" is your friend here :-) Linux quite happily runs software raid, so if you grab a few hard drives of similar size, you can RAID them together. I'd recommend using a journalling file system - mainly because in the event of a forced reset it won't take you half a day to restart the system :-) I'm not sure how Avantis works, but if you just want to serve CDs (or give the appearance), either simply copy the entire CD to a directory on your new server, or use 'dd' to make a copy of the CD, and use a loopback filesystem to mount it ('mount ./cd.iso /mnt/cd -o loop' or similar). Hope this helps - if you have any further questions, feel free to contact me. I may be a bit slow in replying to my email until I go back to University (on Sunday). Dan - -- dankolb@ox.compsoc.net - --I reserve the right to be completely wrong about any comments or opinions expressed; don't trust everything you read above-- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 6.5.8 iQA/AwUBPDNq/JdDUnce+EgsEQLZ6gCbBqKGQ4PIVrki4a/zmCBJo72VrvcAoOyo i4dHmnjzR+zr+s1L6M/iwlxT =Scez -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 07:58:18PM -0800, Mark Presley wrote:
We are a school with Language College status and desperately need to upgrade/supplement our existing server.
We run an NT4 raid server, with only 1GB of free space (from 37.5GB available), CD Server (Avantis-not set up properly, due to supply of 'faulty s/w', Avantis only want £200 for s/w that works), with a mix of win95/98 workstations, (approx 130).
Which ever solution we opt for, it will have to be reliable and be maintained by 2 technicians whose enthusiasm far exceeds their knowledge (at the moment, but they are learning, quickly).
Suggestions please???
Since it sounds like your technicians are a bit inexperienced, I'd buy a server pre-loaded & configured with Linux/BSD from an outfit such as GND: www.gnd.co.uk ....I think. Also worth investing in some documentation IMO. There's a Samba book by O'Reilly & `Running Linux' also published by O'Reilly - which I still occasionally refer to even after using Linux for some 5 yrs. BTW, I don't have any commercial relationship with GND - I just bought a monitor off them a couple of years ago (my bit to support Linux firms:), but I've heard good things about them and they're clued up. Make a list of what software you're running (& want to run) on your NT server & people on this list can suggest suitable Linux alternatives.
Mark Presley Holy Family Catholic School Keighley
That's not a million miles from me and I'd be happy to call around & help you with setting it up if need be. -- Frank *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Boroughbridge. Tel: 01423 323019 --------- PGP keyID: 0xC0B341A3 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* http://www.esperance-linux.co.uk/ Why I Can't Go Out With You: I'd LOVE to, but... -- I'm teaching my ferret to yodel.
participants (3)
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'Frank Shute'
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Dan Kolb
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Mark Presley