Cost-effective servers
First of all, my debian machines are running terrifically well, so thanks to
all who have labored long and hard to produce such a quality product!!
I am helping my local school district in Maine establish networks and servers.
We are farthest along at the high school with about a 120 node ethernet mostly
macs. Currently we have a jerry-built 586 PCI, 16MB, ATAPI CD, 2GB IDE linux
box we have been using as a testbed for services.
One very important service we offer is appleshare using netatalk. One directory
is set up read-only and used for common applications and data. Additionally,
many students have logins and have their own appleshare volumes (a directory in
their home directory). This allows them to park documents in there and get at
them from any node without having to lug diskettes. Also students can create a
'public_html' directory and drop appropriate documents in there which are then
available on the web server (see below). Finally, using the hfs_fs module, we
have experimented with sharing mac CD's, e.g. encyclopedias, with much success
- AND I have dd'd some CD's directly into a raw disk partition, mounted them
with hfs_fs and it works even better!
Encouraged by this success, we hope to put 10 to ? CD's up on raw partitions
and share them via netatalk - one has to watch copyright issues of course.
We also run apache, both accessing our internal web docs and as a proxy. (BTW I
will probably hack the apache source in the next week or so to support proxy
authentication if anyone is interested - unless the apache guys beat me to it).
We only have a 56K connection to the internet, so good proxying is essential to
good performance particularly when teachers are having students access the same
web sites. We cache up to 500MB.
Obviously we need more 'oomph' in the server(s). The questions are simply:
. One server or more than one
. SCSI or IDE
I.e, given a few thousand bucks, how to get the most server bang!
BTW it would be nice to have an optimization model for this sort of thing where
one could categorize application services, hardware, and costs in a
quantitative way to aid in decision-making - capacity planning for Linux!
Thanks,
Michael
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