Ed. Note: This is a fairly common question that we get. Sizing is always a pain, especially when you're moving into a new setup. So if you have any wisdom on the matter, please post in the comments.

We are a K-12 school (K-8 at one site and 6-12 at the other) that is using a Mac Pro at each site to house home folders as well as run OD

My first question is this:  Should one server be handling both of these tasks?  If not, is there a economical way to change this.  I ask because when a class atempts to logon, there is a serious bottle-neck!  To eliminate this at one site, I made the older students (that have larger home folders) mobile with assigned seating in the lab of iMacs.  This seems to have solved the speed issue and I'd like to try something similar at the other site which has a laptop cart of macbooks as its lab. 

So here's the second question: How many accounts can live on a single workstation and work well?

Any help you could offer would be great!

Server & Clients 10.5.6

I've borrowed from Peter Bukowinski's script that will lookup when an AD user's password is due to expire, and expanded upon it to run as a task in the OS X menu bar. The applet includes preference settings for the following: 

1. Adjust how often you are required to change your password (5 – 365 days).
2. Automatically launch the applet at logon. 
3. Display the date your password will expire on the logon window (requires admin permissions).  

This applet is open source and hosted on Google Code: Password Monitor.

Ed. Note: This is interesting as otherwise you'll always be visible over WINS/NetBIOS whether you're actually sharing via SMB or not. 

Finally I believe I found the magic command to disable WINS on Leopard to stop it from showing on a Windows network.

 sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server RegisterWINSName -bool false 

Aqua Connect is giving away a 20-user license of their server and 20
thin client workstations to an educational institution in order to promote more green computing. Bring along
your own Xserve and you'll have a full lab.

More details and the rules for entry can be found at www.EduGoGreen.com.

I had a hard time finding a step-by-step procedure for setting up OS X Server Wiki with Active Directory Integration (aside from just setting authentication to plain text on the Apple site) so, I wrote the following procedure.  Feedback is welcome.

 Enterprise Apple Xserve Wiki and Blog using Active Directory

This may work on Leopard Server as well, but I haven't tested it. There are several brute-force VPN protocol attacks rampant on the internet, and they may leave your VPN service in an unusable state by flooding it with connection requests. 

Read on for a solution… 

NausicaMedia, the french ACSA company, has translated the latest "Tips and Tricks for Macintosh Management for Leopard" in french.

For all the french speaking sysadmins around the world, you will be able to read the John de Troye's guide for managing your users accounts in your own language.

"Trucs et astuces pour la Gestion du Macintosh pour Leopard" is available at NausicaMedia's website.

I've been doing some pretty intensive research down here with iSCSI setups of various kinds. This market segment was a little rough a year ago…but it's much better now. Though there are still no "official" OS X Server setups that support it….certainly not Xsan (too bad!)

read on for a few more iSCSI notes…

Since we haven't seen much about this elsewhere…

Novell have now released Open Enterprise Server 2 SP1 which includes new Novell-engineered protocol support for Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) on the Linux platform.

See http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/ for more information.

After 6 years of development, Mike Bombich is retiring NetRestore, one of the most used and useful tools for OS X mass deployment. Mike cites an aging code base and other tools in the market as reasons for his descision. Read all the details here