Samba and hardware

[Bill Gradwohl]

Daniel Chénard wrote:

>It's for a school and the student or administrative person will work on
>smalls files.  This is for replace the Novell 4 infrastructures.  So the
>sysadmin  (and my too)  doesnt know  if the actual hadware will be
>suffisant.
>
>which kind of information du u want?
>  
>
We were a Novell Gold reseller since 1985 till a few years ago when it 
became clear to us that NetWare was dead and that Linux would take over 
its role. Novell eventually came to the same conclusion.

Linux is comparable to NetWare in terms of how much hardware it takes to 
run a site. If anything, Linux is more efficient for your type of 
environment.

You said 400 users. Does that mean 400 machines? I'd be more concerned 
with cabling issues and disk space than how much CPU power the box 
needs. I suspect any modern P4/AMD will do and it won't be breathing 
hard 99% of the time. Give it 2Gig or more of RAM.

I'd get a 3WARE RAID controller, attach as many SATA drives as I needed, 
then attached a few more for good measure. If your end users Windows 
environments are going to be stored on the server as profiles, then 
their desktops can cause you to download lots of data at startup per 
machine. That data also can eat up quite a bit of server dsk space. 
Whatever you think you need in terms of disk space, get lots more. SATA 
disk is relatively inexpensive.

I'd probably run multiple NICs in your case to separate out the cabling 
systems into manageable groupings. Depending on your electrical system, 
I'd consider using fiber for its optical isolation characteristics 
between the server NICs and the switches. We've seen cases where large 
cabling plants connected to old electrical systems with poor grounding 
caused gear to fail.

Then give the server room a quality UPS. We prefer ferroresonant technology.

-- 
Bill Gradwohl
bill at ycc.com
http://www.ycc.com
spamSTOMPER Protected email