[K12OSN] New Building's LTSP Server

[Julius Szelagiewicz]

I'll chime in on SATA drives. I've been running SATA arrays witout any
problems for a few years now. I still prefer SCSI, but it's hard to beat
SATA price.
julius

On Mon, 18 Apr 2011, Joseph Bishay wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I hope everyone had a good weekend.
>
> So I'm waist-deep in the design of our new building.  Quite the
> exercise being in charge of designing nearly everything that runs on
> electricity in the building!
>
> I wanted some recommendations for our new LTSP network please.  Details:
>
> 1) Total of 65 computers spread out across 3 floors -- library,
> computer lab, and study lounge are areas of high concentration.
> 2) All cabling is cat 6
> 3) All switches and network cards are gigabit and unmanaged.
> 4) Terminals are 2-3 year old Pentium 4 computers or inexpensive
> modern computers (IE suitable for local apps or thin client)
> 5) Distribution is Edubuntu
> 6) The setup is for an elementary school students, teachers, and admin
> staff / business meetings.  No specific software except OpenOffice and
> browsing
> 7) Budget for all servers needed is $2000 (IE: either one server for
> LTSP or if I needed an application server plus home fileserver total
> still $2000)
>
> I've had an old Proliant DL360 G3 (
> http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantdl360/ ) humming
> along for a year and supporting our old building of 15 computers no
> problem.  Has dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz chips and 2 GB of ram and usually is
> underutilized.  The bottle-neck is clearly the RAM as every now and
> then it hits swap.  In our new setup it certainly won't be
> underutilized so I'll certainly need something much more powerful.
>
> Should I look for a cutting edge desktop computer (running an Intel-i
> level chip such as this:
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883108475 ) or
> am I better off getting an actual (older) purpose-built server (Such
> as another proliant)?
>
> Final aspect are the hard drives.  Personally I'm a huge fan of SCSI
> drives -- both this server and the prior custom-built servers had
> rock-solid reliable hard drives that ran non-stop for something like 8
> years without a hitch.  Of course they were super-expensive with the
> RAID controller, etc.  Would you recommend a SATA raid controller and
> SATA drives for such a setup nowadays or stick with SCSI?
>
> Did I miss anything else? :)
>
> Thanks for all your insight!
> Joseph
>
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