[K12OSN] Proposal due Monday, feedback welcome

[Terrell Prude', Jr.]

WARNING:  this is kinda long.

The more DRAM in the server, the better.  I built a dual Athlon 1700+ 
(1.4GHz) machine w/ 4GB DRAM and a fiber Gigabit Ethernet NIC for less 
than $2000 USA.  However, it doesn't have SCSI RAID; it has twin 80GB 
IDE disks.  Twenty-five clients are currently served by it with plenty 
of headroom to spare; according to my calculations, it can easily handle 
forty--and maybe even sixty--before it starts swapping to disk, and this 
is with all of my users running KDE or GNOME (their choice), 
OpenOffice.org, and Mozilla.  Note that, for the same price, you can now 
build the same server with Athlon 2400+'s.

You want to make sure you have plenty of CPU power as well as DRAM.  
Without decent CPU power, running your applications will feel sluggish 
to your students.  The fastest Pentium II chip ever made was the 450MHz 
version, and the Pentium III started at 500MHz (I think).

For thirteen clients, you can get away with 1.5GB DRAM and thus cut the 
price of the above server from just under $2000 US to about $1400 US.  
Replacing the fiber Gig-E NIC with a copper Gig-E NIC (*strongly* 
recommended to run Gig-E on the server!) will bring it down another 
$200, down to $1200 US.  This is about 48,000 Baht according to your 
formula below.  I don't know if you'd be able to stretch it that far, 
but if you can, your students will benefit, and future expansion will be 
very easy and less expensive (just add more DRAM to the server) than 
having to buy a new server and migrate everything.

I absolutely concur with Gigabit Ethernet on the server.  My own 
informal tests show that once you start getting beyond five or six 
machines, a 100Mbps connection just isn't enough to service all of the 
clients.  The "outside" connection on the server can be 100Mbps, but the 
"inside" connection should definitely be Gig-E.  Mine runs on a Catalyst 
3548 switch and sits on one of the GBIC ports, and now I'm sure glad I 
did that way.

For the dial-up option, I personally would discard that option if at all 
possible.  Thirteen people on dial-up just won't cut it.  In a previous 
job, I was in a similar situation involving fifteen people on a 56k 
dialup connection.  We ended up getting dual ISDN lines (DSL wasn't yet 
available at our location) so we could do our jobs effectively.

Depending on your budget, you may also consider Coyote Linux, a 
floppy-based distribution, running on an old 486.  I used that for about 
a year as my firewall/NAT gateway, and it worked nicely for me.  This 
might possibly save you from having to buy an old Pentium II for 
SmoothWall, but I can say that SmoothWall is a fine product; I used it 
for about a month.

For IMAP mail servers, I'd suggest Courier-IMAP and Postfix.  This is 
the setup that I run, and I find it easier to deal with than sendmail.  
No slam on sendmail--it's the backbone of all Internet email and thus 
very much battle-tested--but it is complex.  Courier-IMAP is nice 
because it uses maildirs for both speed and resilience.  Note that my 
mail server runs on an AMD K6-2 at 300MHz, with 256MB DRAM, and this has 
proven to be way overkill.  I've found that you can do it in 64MB DRAM 
and a Pentium-133, as long as your disk drive is large enough to 
accommodate all the stored email (disk quotas can help here if necessary).

If you go with Courier-IMAP, make sure that /home is nice and big, 
because that's where all the emails will be stored.  If you go with 
UW-IMAP (the more traditional choice), then it's /var that needs to be 
big (don't make /home tiny, though). 

Hopefully this helps.

--TP

Dan Bo wrote:

>(The Baht can be converted to US$ by dividing by about
>40)
>In a casual conversation with my new school's
>secretary while we were travelling to a seminar, I
>mentioned setting up the school with computers. I said
>that I could probably do it for about 90k Baht with
>thin clients. Well, I have now been asked to make a
>formal proposal to the school director on Monday, and
>am looking for some feedback.
>
>First, the requirements (or, since the director
>doesn't know anything, what I look at as
>requirements):
>
>    * One or more servers to serve the thin clients,
>    * About thirteen clients, scattered throughout the
>school, though more if I can,
>    * Software to handle document exchange,
>scheduling, etc...
>    * Software to administer the school and track
>students,
>    * Internet access on a dial-up which limited
>numbers of folks can turn on or off,
>    * Minimum admin work, able to be done by someone
>as an extra duty (and not, me, though I will have time
>to train). 
>
>I am likely to:
>
>   1. Buy two used Compaqs with dual PIIs and RAID
>4.9GB disks X9 that I saw for 15K each recently
>      Total cost 30,000 Baht;
>   2. Bump the RAM on these to over a GB each
>      Ttotal cost 6,000 Baht
>   3. Purchase clients off a shipment from Japan ot
>the US, P200s 32 MB RAM, 2MB video, at about 900 Baht
>each
>      Total cost 12,000 Baht;
>   4. Monitors from Japan for 1,500 Baht each
>      19,000 Baht;
>   5. Buy an old PII to run Smoothwall or ?ECop? 3,500
>Baht;
>   6. Buy a new 16 port switch with one or two gigabit
>ports and one or two gigabit cards for the servers
>???? Baht;
>   7. Use the rest to purchase mice and keyboards;
>   8. Use IceWM with limited menus to limit the memory
>consumption per client;
>   9. Use one server for thin client use and the other
>for scheduling software, documents, and mail. Rsync
>the two servers nightly to allow me to turn services
>on in case of failure of one of them.
>  10. Use eGroupware, a fork of PhPGroupware, which I
>have used before.
>  11. Use Webmin to divide the admin tasks among
>several folks.
>  12. Possibly use SchoolMation 1.0, but survive on
>eGroupware alone if I can;
>  13. And try, for the first time in my life, to set
>up an IMAP mail setup for use inside eGroupware. 
>
>This is an order of magnitude beyond anything I've
>done before, but I don't suspect that I'll have any
>problems with this setup. Suggestions and/or flames
>are welcome...
>Daniel
>
>  
>