RE: [seul-edu] X-Terminal app server specs

[Chris Hedemark <hedemark@bops.com>]

I've built some app servers.  What kind of apps are you running and how
intensively do you anticipate having them used?

For about $2,500 ea. I have gotten rackmount 1GHz Athlon (Thunderbird) with
1GB of RAM and 20GB hard disk.  Most of the filesystem beyond the core OS is
NFS mounted from a fast file server so a large part of the 20GB drive is
temp space.  Unless you are teaching development and will have 12 people all
doing "./configure && make && make install" at once, such a machine should
be fine for most other apps.

The cost of that system should be down a bit since the CPU is now under $200
and RAM has gotten so cheap.  RAM was the biggest part of the cost of this
machine.  But it is also the part that allows you to cache so much and have
so many apps running at once.

Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Loss [mailto:dloss@suscom.net]
Sent: Friday, January 05, 2001 6:07 PM
To: seul-edu@seul.org
Subject: [seul-edu] X-Terminal app server specs


It looks as though my Macintosh X-Terminal lab project is
finally going to get off the ground.  I've secured the donation
of 7 Mac Quadra 650s with monitors, with a good possibility of 5
more, and a 24-port hub to support them and an application
server.  I have a pretty clear idea of how I want to set
everything up, but I'd like some recommendations on sizing the
application server all of these X-Terms will connect to.  It
will have to be a PC, since it's the only big ticket item the
community center will have to buy and PCs are the best bang for
the buck.  How much RAM should I plan on to properly support 7
(and possibly 12 eventually) simultaneous users?  How much hard
drive space should I plan on?  I expect that will depend on the
number of accounts and how much space I plan to allow for each. 
How fast of a processor is reasonable?

I look forward to your advice.

-- 
Doug Loss           The art of medicine consists of amusing the
dloss@suscom.net    patient while nature cures the disease.
(570) 326-3987             Voltaire