Decision help for lab / school

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Level 1

32 points

Decision help for lab / school

I have a small school. We are are all on 10.6.8. Classrooms, admin/teacher offices and a student Lab are the three primary groups within our org.

I currently only use general logons for students - via class. ie, Grade6 - all grade6 students log on at the same time with same logon. this works for most things, but not for some things. I want to move to individual logons for the students. but, I have to consider the rest of the network, and advantages and disadvantages of this...

Should I setup a second OD server just for the lab / students?

What are some advantages and disadvantes of putting the kids on the same OD as the the rest of the school / separating them?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)

Posted on Feb 17, 2013 5:11 PM

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Answer 1

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Don Roedl

Level 2

211 points

Feb 17, 2013 5:36 PM in response to AppleJason

Here are some thoughts on that. Some advantages of a 2nd server would be to balance the workload between servers for AFP and other services. Criteria to consider here would be the number and types of services you have running on your servers. Another consideration would be your network infrastructure. I believe a single OS X server is capable of handling 175 simultaneously logged in users. How efficiently it can do this depends upon the type of work being done and how big the files that are being moved around might be. If your switching at gigabit throughout the network, with gig nics in most of the workstations, it should be fine. However YMMV. Another minor consideration woud be security for staff and admins. Good passwords for staff here should handle that consideration in your environment. If your single OD server is efficiently handling the load which you are putting it under now, I would think that there would be no need for a 2nd OD server.

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