Leopard Server in educational setting

[barrr]

I currently have a panther server which is going to be replaced by a new snow leopard server. My current server has two HDs that are mirrored. All students (380 kids in the school) are authenticated and save to their home directories on this server. They can then use laptops, computers in the lab and other rooms to easily access their data by authenticating to the server and attaching to their home directories. It has worked FLAWLESSLY for the last 5 years.

Now, the new server is MUCH more powerful, comes with 3 HD (1 for system, 1 for data, 1 for backup using retrospect) and has a lot more RAM than my current Panther machine. I am told that it will be setup so students will save to their client machine, have a mobile account where the data will be transferred or synced.

After doing some research on this I came upon John Welsh’s article that he wrote on Oct 16, 2009 where he gave a favorable recommendation to the 10.6 server and talked about login and logout syncing.

So, here is my question. When I have a class of 30 kids all logging out at one time, saving their documents, and then having the server sync all of them to their home directories at the same time, is this more efficient than having them save directly to the server (I have no applications running on the server, these are installed on the clients throughout the building) at different times during the period? For example, if I have a class of kids working on a Word project chances are they will be saving at different times and thereby hitting the server in small increments instead of all at one time when the period ends. Also, when logging out it would seem to be a lot less effort for the server just to de-authenticate them rather than having to save everything they have done to their home directory.

Perhaps a business server should be set up differently than a school since I doubt everyone in an office, even if you had 30 people in the office would be logging out at exactly the same time like a classroom of 30 kids.

Question is then what do some of you feel is the best way to setup an OSX 10.6 server for a school of 400 kids. The kids have access to the lab which will have 30 new imacs, a classroom set of computer (emacs running Tiger) and a set of laptops running 10.5.

I don’t want real intricate details but some overall guidelines. Oh, I have 1000 mb/s routers and switches.

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

Bob Barr
St. Michael School
Canton OH

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