Smith, I'd highly recommend the HP JetDirect in a small printer like a Laserjet 2x00 series. With 5-10 users and enough RAM in the printer, users won't even notice. They also seem to work well with whatever we throw at them, including OpenBSD (I'll be putting a LJ3500 on the network with an OBSD 3.8 server this week for a project).
The 2x00 series is the smallest that can support a small office and have a JetDirect card internally. If you're going to go for Linux or BSD as your workstation OS, dd is your friend (and is very quick). If you have to use Windows, use Ghost. ________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Smith Sent: Mon 3/20/2006 8:11 PM To: misc@openbsd.org Subject: Re: Small office with BSD blueprint I would even consider doing away with dns and point everyone to the isp dns along with using static ip addresses. You only need dns if you anticipate a lot of users making dns queries to the point of affecting your bandwidth or you need a dns server to point the rest of the internet to your websites. With 5 users, I don't think you will deal with these issues. I would definitely, on such a small setup, get rid of lpd. Use direct ip, meaning everyone prints directly to the printer. I work in a network with about 50 printers and 300 users, and I almost never hear a user complain about print jobs jamming. And some of my users do heavy duty printing. Of course we buy HP network printers or use HP Jetdirect boxes for printers that don't have network cards built in. Do a google for "Windows *Print Migrator* 3.1 <http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9B9F2925-CBC9-44DA- B2C9-FFDBC46B0B17&displaylang=en>" from MS's site (assuming you are catering to a windows workshop). This program is free from MS will make installing printers a breeze. I played with LPD before and it seems more of a headache than direct IP. For full install ... desktop... google for g4u and consider creating an internal ftp server (this is especially great for a unix worksop). Or, in theory, you can create a samba server, do some research on www.*netboot**disk*.com and buy a single copy of norton ghost and thus build yourself a enterprise ghost server without paying for ghost enterprise, in theory. Or, create an ssh server, download "insert" linux, play around with sshfs and ntfsclone on the insert cd to clone workstations (this method I haven't really experimented with other than to create the image). With such a small network, minimize as much work as you can by avoiding services. Joachim Schipper wrote: > On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 03:23:36PM -0500, Will H. Backman wrote: > >> Will H. Backman wrote: >> >>> Looking for feedback on a basic blueprint for a small office using BSD. >>> Situation: Small office with maybe five workstations. >>> Question: What would an all BSD setup look like? >>> Solution that comes to mind: >>> * Single server for DNS, DHCP, LPD, SMTP, IMAP, and home directories. >>> * Full install with whatever desktop environment is chosen. >>> * automount home directories. >>> * Instead of NIS, maybe cron job to rsyc files like /etc/passwd, >>> /etc/hosts, /etc/printcap from central server. >>> >>> Does anyone out there have a similar setup?
