In comp.os.linux.setup Keith Keller <kkeller-usenet@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>:
> On 2008-04-17, damo <votefordamo@gmail.com> wrote:
[..]
>> I wont have access to, or a budget for, high end server boxes.
>> Instead I will be looking at buying more or less standard intel boxes,
>> heaps of RAM and RAID 0+1 setups.

> I don't know how much data you plan to serve, but for your Samba
> fileserver you may consider more disks in a RAID5 or RAID6. Even a 1U
> or 2U box with four or eight drive bays will serve a ton of disk. Don't
> skimp here, get a real hardware RAID card and hot-swappable drive bays,
> so that you can change a failed disk without downing the fileserver.

Seconded! I'd also look into http://www.ltsp.org/ a halfway
reasonable server could easily serve +300 students with thin
clients and save tons of money + time for administrative
purposes.

You can run an extra citrix server for some software needing M$,
though most things can be done with Linux apps. You might want to
run the citrix client on the thin clients to save the server some
horse power and speed things up.

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 112: The monitor is plugged into the serial port