[K12OSN] Networking a new school for K12LTSP?

[Joseph Bishay]

Hello,

Thanks once again for all the insight! I'm going to be going back to
the building committee with much of this in mind.

I'm hoping this isn't a very silly question, but I am a bit confused.

I have a question about the MDF and the IDFs -- where all the network
cabling will be running back to.  Now I know from various setups I've
seen that often where all these cables terminate there is a rack with
the hardware that connects to the switches and the patch panel.  In
our case while we will have a patch panel where the various Cat6
cables will come in and terminate.  Assuming 4+ drops / room, we'll
have many, many terminations.  Now, due to the cost of rack-mounted
equipment, and what we can afford/is donated to us, it is nearly 99%
sure we won't have rack mounted units for the servers.  Is this not a
problem if they can't fit into that distribution centre (which seems
to be not much larger than a big closet)?  Is there a problem to have
the servers (full size towers) in another room in the building and
running cables to the distribution centre? Or will there be some sort
of bottleneck?

My apologies if this is an obvious thing.

The second question relates to the server setup. Currently we have 12
computers running on 1 server.  In the future building would it be
better to set up different k12ltsp servers serving up everything  (IE:
clones) spread around the building (IE: 1 for school, 1 for daycare, 1
for youth lounge) or would it be better to have 1 k12ltsp server for
the whole building, 1 for NFS mount /home, 1 application server for
the whole building,etc.

Looking forward to your answer
Joseph