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#1 2003-01-22 3:25 pm

volk
Basking in the glow of a 24" iMac
From: Trapped in the RDF
Registered: 2000-10-04
Posts: 1392
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Xserve right for me?

OK, I have very little experience with servers.  All of the networks I have managed have all been simple TCP/IP peer-to-peer.  I find myself now looking at getting a server to handle several tasks and find the Xserve a pretty appealing size and price point for me.

I work in an all Windows environment in some small radio stations.   We use e-mail heavily (and have suffered through many virus infestations as a result of it), we currently backup all of our music and commercial data (approximately 35 Gigs worth per station, 3 stations total) to an additional slave hard drive within each on-air computer, we print to a Minolta Dialta Fax/Printer, and we are considering moving our website development and serving in-house.

I understand that the Xserve can act as a Windows print server.  Does it need to have a native driver for the Minolta, or does each individual client computer have the driver, and the Xserve just actively regulate the jobs?  Our print activity is pretty minimal.

Can I add drives to the Xserve and format them as NTFS volumes?  In other words, will the Xserve use Windows 2000 formatted drives, or merely allow Windows files to be stored on HFS+ while granting access to the files from the CFS/SMB sharing services?  Just wondering if it is merely a respository or a mirror to my existing NTFS drives?  We would only require a full backup to occur once a week during the early morning hours when we traditionally have extremely light traffic on our network.

I mentioned my frequent problems with viruses, and I would love to be able to have all my e-mails come into the Xserve only, from which they could be screened and passed along to the inboxes of the intended recipient.  Is this possible and easy to do?  It would be nice to finally be able to keep our network clean from e-mail virii.

Web serving.  We might bring our websites in house.  I know Apache is the preferred web server of choice for most stuff, is it easy to configure for the Xserve?  How many simultaneous hits could the Xserve withstand?  It really only needs to handle three fairly light sites, with maybe a small built in database for collecting user information for promotions. 

Could an Xserve handle all these?  Would the base offering with more storage be able to do all these things?  Is there another site where I could discuss these questions with Xserve techies or where I could find extensive setup/useage guides?

Thanks in advance.


...therefore understand the matter, and consider the vision.  Daniel 9:23c

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#2 2003-01-22 3:33 pm

NAG
A witch!
Royal Wombat
From: /usr/local/apps/nag
Registered: 2000-09-22
Posts: 30225

Re: Xserve right for me?

The department I work for at a university uses an Xserver for Windows and Mac fileserving, webserving, and QuickTime stream serving. We also have a phpBB forum up and the MySQL server handles some dynamic content. It does a good job, although I don't know if our load would be comparable to yours.

I do not recommend the included email server. It is not very good in my experience. Everything else is fairly easy to set up.

I don't know if you can share windows drives but I suspect you can, although I doubt you can use it as your boot drive.

I haven't tried the print server out so I can only guess that it handles printers as well as OS X client.


"You call *this* archaeology?" • Professor Henry Jones
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