Daniel Chénard wrote:
We were a Novell Gold reseller since 1985 till a few years ago when it became clear to us that NetWare was dead and that Linux would take over its role. Novell eventually came to the same conclusion.It's for a school and the student or administrative person will work on smalls files. This is for replace the Novell 4 infrastructures. So the sysadmin (and my too) doesnt know if the actual hadware will be suffisant.
which kind of information du u want?
Linux is comparable to NetWare in terms of how much hardware it takes to run a site. If anything, Linux is more efficient for your type of environment.
You said 400 users. Does that mean 400 machines? I'd be more concerned with cabling issues and disk space than how much CPU power the box needs. I suspect any modern P4/AMD will do and it won't be breathing hard 99% of the time. Give it 2Gig or more of RAM.
I'd get a 3WARE RAID controller, attach as many SATA drives as I needed, then attached a few more for good measure. If your end users Windows environments are going to be stored on the server as profiles, then their desktops can cause you to download lots of data at startup per machine. That data also can eat up quite a bit of server dsk space. Whatever you think you need in terms of disk space, get lots more. SATA disk is relatively inexpensive.
I'd probably run multiple NICs in your case to separate out the cabling systems into manageable groupings. Depending on your electrical system, I'd consider using fiber for its optical isolation characteristics between the server NICs and the switches. We've seen cases where large cabling plants connected to old electrical systems with poor grounding caused gear to fail.
Then give the server room a quality UPS. We prefer ferroresonant technology.
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