[K12OSN] PD for staff (really OO)

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, 2004-04-18 at 01:49, Andrew Fournier wrote:
> There are a couple issues with the so-so servers. They leave me in the
> position of needing a central home (though that is needed for user
> mobility anyway)

In return for building a central authentication, home, and
email server, all the other boxes become interchangeable
and almost disposable.  You can keep a shelf spare instead
of backing them up.

>  and will ide drives handle 20+ clients? would
> offloading some processes (as well as home ) help? surely exporting home
> will help a lot. 

The key is to have 4 gigs of ram in the desktop servers
so most read activity will be cached.  I'd also try to
put /var on a 2nd drive (on the 2nd controller) so
log writes don't compete with application reads.

> Cheap refurbished scsis would help but that is hard to get past
> purchasing.....

With Dell, the place to save money is to buy 3rd party RAM.
At www.penguincomputing.com you can get RAM included at
a good price and covered by their warranty (although RAM
seldom is bad these days).  However the Dell 2650's have
a nice remote management feature where you can reboot them
and get to bios from a separate network connection - but
again that is something you would almost never need.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com