sizing a Samba DC/fileserver install for a large educational setting (Re: Confused about samba4 & s3fs)

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sun, 2012-08-19 at 20:06 +0200, steve wrote:

> Andrew
> Thank you so much for coming down to this level. I now know what is 
> available and the choices I have to make.
> 
> Given a college with 2000 students and dual boot KDE/w7 with art and 
> design taking up the vast majority of the file server in jpg's via gimp 
> and photoshop alone, where would you go?
> 
> S4/s3fs. S4DC/S3.6 

This.  It doesn't really matter what solution the DC uses (so use the
default: s3fs), but for 2000 students hitting a server with graphic
files, I would ideally suggest a separate server for them.

> . What sort of hardware specs am I looking at for the 
> DC and fileserver? 

I'm not an expert in server sizing, but the DC should require much less
than a few weeks ago, now I've plugged most of the memory leaks :-). 

For a site that large, redundancy is critical, so I'm hoping you have a
good RAID configuration and backups etc for the file server.  (The
solutions for redundancy beyond that tend to be beyond school budgets,
but folks on the samba list might have suggestions). 

For the DC, I would have multiple domain controllers.  Hopefully with
the memory leaks sorted out, it will be possible to gain some real-world
experience with how much resources they need.  

> The only necessity I've been given is that I block 
> control panel if students use w$. I can GPO that. I don't think that 
> this is a complex installation but it is big for us.

It is only complex in that you have some specific requirements that are
best met by splitting the roles, as it allows you to choose the best
components for each task. 

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org