jpp@specialix.co.uk (John Pettitt) (03/28/91)
We are about to upgrade our engineering dept network, I am looking for thoughts, suggestions, war stories from the net. N.B. Other systems support office/admin use and are not subject to change at the moment. 1) Background: We have 14 (soon to be 20) people using a mixed network that looks like: Server: bugs.specialix.co.uk 486/25 2G disk 32 MB ram 32 serial ports Used as NFS server and `home' system for everybody Serever: arthur.specialix.co.uk 386/25 600 MB disk 8 MB ram 8 serial ports News, Mail, modem server, primary name server, backup server (exabyte) Clients: flopsy, mopsy, bunny, pipkin, peter, bungie, wig, dylan UNIX clients - these are development targets - they have a volatile, non secure, operatin environment. Clients: bigwig, hazel, cottontail, roger, thumper PC/NFS clients (transputer development support, PCB CAD etc) Clients: fred Xterminal Most of the software development is for 386/486 targets and so whatever is used as a compute server must be able to generate ?86 code. 2) Expansion We would like to move from dumb terminals to a GUI environment (probably X). We are out of performance on bugs (load average peaks > 10) We are considering: a) A multi processor 486 (Compaq ?) Xterminals b) A Sparc or MIPS based file server One or more 486 `compute' servers Xterminals c) A Sparc or MIPS based file server A 386 PC for each engineer 3) Questions What is the collective wizdom of the net on the above ? Will we be out of ethernet bandwidth with any of the above ? Should we consider workstations (is the extra cost worth it ?) Please reply by mail -- John Pettitt, Specialix International, Email: jpp@specialix.com Tel +44 (0) 9323 54254 Fax +44 (0) 9323 52781 Disclaimer: Me, say that ? Never, it's a forged posting !