[Micheal]

I am the Network Administrator for a public school district in Texas. I'm currently designing the layout for our new LAN. I would like anyone's opinions or comments on the best way to go about this. First, I will present our current configuration, followed by two possible solutions. Please provide your choice as to which solution to go with, and if you have the time, why you would choose it. Thanks!

CURRENT CONFIGURATION:
11 remote schools
2 independant servers at each school
no actual connectivity between the campuses except via internet
some T1's used for internet access, or ISDN

RECOMMENDATION ONE:
- do away with multiple servers at each school, instead have a server farm at our central office (server's include a main server for dns, user authentication & AD; a mirror of the main server; a print server; a data storage server; a lab server to run all of the educational programs; a library server for a database driven program for book cataloging; and a general administration server)
- UPS's in place with either solar or generator power backup
- bring all of the routers to the central office

RECOMMENDATION TWO:
- one server at each school to be used for user authentication, lab programs, library programs, printing
- UPS's in place at each campus
- router on campus

FOR BOTH RECOMMENDATIONS, THESE APPLY:
- 802.11b (upgradeable to 802.11a) wireless backbone for intranet
- 4 bonded T1's to the central office for internet access
- all equipment at central office connected by fiber
- approx. 7,000 users district wide, of which no more than 20% are every actively using the network at one time

Please send me your comments to: mroux@emsisd.com

Thank you all!

Best regards,
Micheal Roux
Network Administrator - EMSISD

[clutch]

I would say something of a combination of the two; use the central approach (nice look, btw) to maintaining your AD catalog and masters of databases and then have "slave" servers at each site handling local logon and printing duties. This would work well incase of a downed link between a remote school and the central office. You might also have several options for maintaining localized copies of your databases (for your library catalog as an example) depending on the DB app that's used. In this manner, you could probably get away with backing up your servers locally OR at the main site depending on the method and application used. This would also permit for administration at the top level and/or delegation depending on the AD model at the lower levels without having "the computer guy" at one school being able to install applications at another.

[ryoko]

Please don't take offence, but that sounds a lot like a homework question.

-Ry

[Dirty Harry]

On a sidenote, its propably not a good idea to use solar power for the backup, you'd have to have batteries anyhow. The batteries you can load cheaper from the grid.
Unless of course you Texans are outta grid power for many days in a row...

H.