Before I answer this question, I thought I would emphasize what others have already told you. Concentrate on stability and reliability. Performance is defiantly secondary with a small number of users. If you were running NT 4 a Pentium 166 with 128 MB of EDO ram could easily meet your needs. (Not that I am recommending this, just showing you that this does not require a powerful server)Quote:
Originally posted by *-SiNcErE-*:
ooh. forgot about another aspect.
as for servers, what software should I have on it? other than the applications workstations will be using.
I know I need Win2k Server edition, but how bout anti-virus? or any network monitoring software? or any monitoring software for that matter.
The only thing that a file and print server is likely to run that puts much strain on the system is Microsoft Exchange. Exchange is Microsoft's E-mail server, and it is a resource hog compared to other similar products like Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise.
One very important thing you seem to be missing is a tape drive. It is absolutely essential that nightly backups be run on the system and that copies of the tapes find their way off-site in case of a disaster. Companies that have a total data loss have almost 90 % chance of going out of business within a year.
You probably want to go with a 12/24 GB SCSI DAT tape drive. Anything beyond this gets very expensive. You will need at least 11 tapes, 4 - Mon to Thurs daily, 4 Friday/weekly, and at least 3 monthly tapes. You perform a full backup every night. Reuse the Mon - Thurs tapes each week. The last day of each week you use a Friday tape and reuse them each month. At the last day of every month you perform a monthly backup and save the tape for at least 3 months.
There are variations on this but this is the one I prefer. Stay away from differential and incremental backups if possible, since they are more difficult to restore from. The only time I use them is when my backups take too long and I cannot complete them in a single night. You will not have this problem and you would still need to do a full backup on the weekend.
You can buy backup software, but the built in software in Win2K should meet your needs.
As for other software you should have anti-virus software for sure. I would also recommend Diskeeper defrag software. Win2K has licensed but the additional scheduling and features available in the Diskeeper package are nice. You should defrag nightly.
The only other software I would recommend is a mail server package. You may get a good deal on MS Exchange, but I prefer Lotus Notes, which can also double as a really nice database/app server platform. The built in software on Win2K should do everything else you need on a small network, including network monitoring, DNS, DHCP etc.
Make sure you choose IP addresses that are note routed on the Internet. This will avoid problems with acquiring IP addresses. For example 10.xxx.xxx.xxx addresses are what you want to use.
Defiantly go for a 100MB switch you will see a big performance difference especially on large files.
The other thing you may want to add is a separate server connected to the internet running NAT software and a firewall to give your network internet access via cable modem or DSL. Never run this from your file server though, that is just asking for trouble.
