Networking Help

[Merardon]

My college professor is rather cruel, and I have to design a company network with only minimal knowledge of networking. Could anyone outline the pros and cons of different server types, and the basic costs of each? It would be exceedingly helpful. Should we worry about running FreeBSD, Slackware or similar, or should we go for a server with a warranty? This all has to be cost justifiable and something a sane company would want to purchase. (And no, wireless isn't allowed) Many many thanks in advance.

[marshmn]

Hmmmm.... Firstly, I would have thought that there are better forums out there for this type of topic - I'm sure there must be some network forum/mailing lists out there, and if not then probably the off-topic forum here would have been more appropriate

Secondly, the answer is "it depends". It would depend on what you mean by "network". Are you just wanting to connect multiple machines to the internet? Or to handle file storage on a central server? or give the machines access to a shared printer? Or what?

Matt

[Merardon]

I was just hoping for some pros/cons of the various architecture available. Printer sharing, 168 computers, 44 printers, etc. As for other forums, this is the only computer one I happen to frequent, unfortunately.

[lardman]

unfortunately

Well that's faith for you :-D

Si

[JohnKiniston]

One word, Apple!

Take a look at the XServe G5

Coming with a Unlimited connection license OS X Server can handle all your file/print server needs as well as do FTP, DNS, Mail and Web serving.

Applecare is cheap 3 years of support for less than $1k and the servers themselves are not all that expensive either, I'd recommend a dual processor over the single.

Dont buy Apple ram, That's where they get you on price.

With a built in 80 gig drive you can start small for your storage needs and grow up to three internal drives and possibly up to 100 external drives attached via FireWire.

Also there's the option of a xServe raid, 5.6 TB of space for 13k!

I'm presently involved with a project at my work to replace ~40 SUN Microsystems servers with 22 Apple xServe Cluster nodes, And 11 of those are offsite mirrors of the primary servers so in reality its 11 servers replacing 40+.

Also as it is there's so much spare cpu cycles I'm starting to share tasks on one server that was origionally tasked for two different servers and I still have loads of free CPU and RAM.

[Merardon]

unfortunately

Well that's faith for you :-D

Si
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I didn't mean to imply that. At least, I think I didn't. I can't seem to remember.

Thanks for the recommendation, JohnKiniston.