Hello all,

I'm trying to plan for multi-site network for a small charter school in North East LA. I need to manage:

Files via file server
Email via Google Apps
Safe and Frequent Data Backup
And I'd like to look at maybe an LDAP server for the users

Just a quick note, I'm not looking for help actually configuring it right now, I need the plan. I just don't know enough about what network services exist and what they can do.

That being said, I have 3 campuses.

Site A will have 2 bundled T1s in the near future
Site B has T1 connection, and will have the same
Site C will have T1 connection, has 3MBps ADSL.

We have a VoIP service and have teachers, staff and students using Internet regularly during the day, although not all at the same time, so it never really peaks hard for a long period of time.

I guess I'm looking for thumbs up or thumbs down, and maybe a quick explanation on whether I'm crazy or just misinformed.

Site B has the room for the file server and doesn't have too much traffic, so I'd like to setup the file server there running samba for the local people and rsync-ing, AFS or some other type of mirroring (i think that's right, ???)to a server at Sites A and C where users can access via Samba there. At night, it can Sync backup to the main file server. The server would backup to some type of backup drive. I liked the ones from TapesSuck.com (saw them at SCaLE7). They're like tapes, but HDs. And every week backup to Amazon S3.

Google Apps Education Ed. has been pretty easy to manage, so I just need access.

LDAP, I'd like to see implemented to help with Intranet, Email Client, and other web Apps logins and network services that we have (printing, scanning, etc).

So what's the good word. Any suggestions are appreciated. And any links that explain what these services do, better hardware, etc, where I can research this would be very helpful. Thank you.

Which distro are you looking at using? Frequent and safe backup - rsync, bacula. Are you looking at Skole Linux? Edubuntu? k12linux? What sort of school setting are you looking at (high school, jr. high, combined)? (I'm a teacher who's very interested in promoting FOSS in Education; I'd be interested to know how this progresses.)

I've had most of my experience with servers running Fedora. My old file server is still running Fedora 7. For security and stability, I'd be running the latest CentOS for the file servers and probably rsync for the backup and AFS (i think) for easy file access.

I am in the process of setting up an LTSP server for the students, but that's a whole 'nother set of shenans that I'll get into once the server gets here next week.

Cheers.

We're actually 2 public charter schools. 1 = K-8, 2 = 9-12. However we only go as far as 9th grade right now. The LTSP setup that I'm working on will depend on how the testing goes. It will either be Fedora 10 with LTSP or the latest Edubuntu.

1. I don't want to use the old ltsp so K12LTSP is out. (for the most part)
2. Never really used Skole, but I gues I'm open to it, although it's kind of a third place type deal.
3. I would like to test out K12Linux, but wanna make sure it's fully functional and has all the repos that Fedora has.
4. I want Fedora 10 with LTSP, it's supposed to be already built in, but Fedora has always some suprise up their sleeve (i feel). So it depends how much it doesn't make me pull my hair out. That and it does have Kiosk and it's favored since I've used Fedora before.
5. Edubuntu 8.10 supposedly has it already built. I've found X-buntu usually has things pretty well setup, but I have no experience with it and I don't really like Gnome, even though most things work in it better.

I guess I'll see. I'll probably post my progress later on for this project once I get going on it. In the mean time I have to find more about how to setup the file server for the teachers.

Cheers.

Seeing as this is for a production env, Fedora might be a bit bleeding edge, not to mention very frequent turnover of versions.
Maybe look at Centos or RHEL?