on Fri, May 18, 2001 at 03:08:55PM +0000, joe golden ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > Our school has a Dell Dimension XPS T450 with > pentium III x86 Family 6 Model 7 Stepping 3 450 MHz processor > 128 MB Ram > one 5GB hard drive and one 3GB hard drive > ethernet card > Sony RW drive > Can I use this as a *server* for a 12 machine linux network. > > Main workstation uses will be internet research and word processing. > I'm sure this machine could function fine as a NFS file server and > proxy server for web pages.
No problem. Hell, my P-200/96 box does fine for that, at about 8% max CPU load. Runs IPNAT, IPF, Squid, on OpenBSD. Following are two separate issues. > Could it handle 12 simultaneous X sessions smoothly? Very likely not with the RAM you've got, for traditional applications. I'd up that to 512-1G or better. It's going to be cheaper to support the memory on one box than on 12. If you're going to be swapping a lot, striped fast SCSI is going to help some, though swap is slow no matter what. > Administration would be much easier if One server was doing all > security and file permission checking, etc. This is orthogonal to running everything on one server. You might be interested in some sort of clustering solution, though what and which one I really don't know. Most clustering tools I'm aware of are geared at, e.g.: scientific or data processing. Other alternatives include policy driven updates, NFS-mounting partitions, or use of advanced filessytems such as Coda (an intriguing possibility, though I've no idea if it would work). A friend and I were discussing things like Win2K's policy management -- I don't use it but he does. Seems much of same could be accomplished with a suitable clustering / distributed management system. Might be an interesting topic for discussion. Other > Thanks in advance, > Joe Golden > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? There is no K5 cabal http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ http://www.kuro5hin.org
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