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Hardware Recommendations for a School Server?
nychef asks: "My school has decided to give me money to set up a server for my club. I'll be running e-mail for about 250 people, and webpages for about 100 which will mostly be static webpages, but there will be a few dynamic ones. I am trying to figure out just how powerful I need the hardware to be. They gave me a pretty decent budget, but my budget is to include the internet line. So I want to maximize bandwidth and minimize the cost of the server. I am looking in the range of dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram. Is this adequate or overkill?" nychef has a budget of about $4,000. What kind of hardware and bandwidth options do you think he can afford?
Bandwith is a recurring charge. Is this budget to just setup the line or to pay for it for a period of time. That is a big factor.
As far as what you stated, it seems adequate. That is the same # of people I support at work and we have dual p4's as well with 3 disk raid5 and 1gb ram on linux.
Chris
Check with the Dept of Education. One of the things that Al Gore did that was really nice was give dirt cheap rates (sometimes free depending on the school and their demographics) on T1 lines for schools and educational institutions. It's been years since I waded through the paperwork for a school but believe me it's worth it. They even give you a stipend for the router and switch.
This is all of course so long as Bush hasn't done yet another stupid thing.