Backend school network rebuild (Filter & Ghosting Qs)

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Brak710

[H]ard|Gawd
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Oct 27, 2008
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My school in PA is very into having a nice and up-to-date computer system. We have multiple computer labs with about 20-30 computers (all Windows XP Pro now, got rid of the Win2000 stragglers), and all is well in that department since we upgraded and finished that last year.

Each student (500-600 people) and teacher has an account, with mapped My Documents and things like that. Faculty (30-40 people) has a linux based email server, and we have a Windows 2003 Server for the domain controller. It uses a Bess firewall, and it's pretty bad. I mean... Really bad. The technical director has shown interest in rebuilding a few of the backend things such as the filter and storage. Some hardware things like moving from a cheap switch rack to a Enclosed server cabinet with AC, allowing us to then move the domain controller and email server to rack-mount boxes and keep them cooler.

Did I mention that the domain server nearly had a serious melt-down over the summer when no one was around? Getting a better window mount AC worked, but it was temporary at best.

We're probably looking at $80,000-$100,000 in spending this year, and most of the killer expenses from the past, like giving each normal class room a new computer and a smart board with projector are gone. I assume we can spend quite a bit on these upgrades, but I'd like to get him a rough idea that is very appealing in the fact that it will not cost much. I'd love to only spend a fraction of the budget and do a lot of open-source installations.

The actual network hardware like the switches are not that old, as they are all gigabit, but the "router" is the Windows server.

I was looking into a dedicated Untangle box for the firewall/router and web filter. I'm not fully sure how that would work out since my VM server kinda sucks at building a mock network with clients for testing. Do any of you have any experience or tips on a school-quality filter and router? Would we need to pay for anything with untangle for this level of service, or will the open-source parts work (with things like Active Directory? I've played with Dansguardian a bit, but I figured something more visual would be better since after this year I'm going to be off to college (hopefully network administration :p) and they will need to do most of the maintenance on their own.

One other thing we wanted to look into was possibly ghosting (i think that's the common term) all the computers on the network so they get wiped and rebuilt nightly or weekly.

We probably have 125-150 computers, and I'm not sure how out network our topology would handle a situation like having every computer all downloading the disk image at one time. I've never done ghost images other than for a single computer, so if anyone has a good reference link or personal experience with getting a whole network to be images and still be a unique computer to the domain controller, we would greatly appreciate it. We have some stuff tied to the computer names (ex. LIB-ROW1-1, 201-ROW1-1) like identifying where the computer is so the default is printer is set the nearest located one.

Also, would 2 of these servers be a good deal for the Untangle and replace the email server? Or would something else be better or more cost effective for such an application?

Is the AC server cabinet even a good idea, or to costly for what it does?

I'm pretty much a noob at this, but since I really feel this is where I want my career to go, I really want to get involved in this project to learn all I can. If this is the wrong place to ask this, I do apologize, but I figure I can learn more from the real pros here than I ever could than going blindly into this project or playing with stuff in VMs by myself. :p
 
Captain Colo (one of the members here) has installed Untangle on one of those Asus 1U boxes...had good luck with it.

I've installed Untangle on some Dell R200 1U servers, it works fine with their onboard SATA RAID controller and pair of Broadcom gigaNICs. Nice box, under a grand, good warranty.

Untangle has good decent content filtering, anti spyware, antivirus, etc. I have it installed at a school, combined with their OpenDNS account....their content filtering is doubled up.
 
We use surf patrol for our district. We have SMS but no one knows how to use it, it was setup but technically your supposed to be able remotely ghost it.
 
i feel like you would want a bit more power for almost 1k users on the firewall....

maybe one of the R200 with Xeon and more memory, or even dual proc on one of the free dell upgrades.

if you are looking for more with teh email server, may be a good idea for Exchange for staff, and something like Google Apps for students (or exchange if you like), most students know how to use Google and love the interface.

Not so sure on imaging, i know MS has that SteadyState thing but that may be a smaller scale

with a school you should go with a OEM company, Dell, HP whatever, you get crazy good pricing and have the warranty =)
 
marley1 said:
i feel like you would want a bit more power for almost 1k users on the firewall....

maybe one of the R200 with Xeon and more memory, or even dual proc on one of the free dell upgrades.

if you are looking for more with teh email server, may be a good idea for Exchange for staff, and something like Google Apps for students (or exchange if you like), most students know how to use Google and love the interface.
Click to expand...

Well, remember, we only have a bit over 100 computers, I just meant we have 600 or so user accounts for the students. Not 600 users browsing away at one time, at most we would have one student per computer, but even then, that's going to be pretty rare. I'd say 60-70 active users at all times during school hours.

As for the email, it's only for faculty members at the moment. We have no plans for student email, as it's only a high school. I'd assume that's more of a deal for a college.

Thanks for the info so far, guys!
 
o sorry =)

so id run exchange for the faculty.

i would run a r200 like yeolde does just for the warranty =)

maybe a few server 08 machines for domain, exchange yada.
 
Don't really have anything constructive to add, but I just wanted to say welcome to the forums =)
Good Luck.
 
xdivenx said:
Don't really have anything constructive to add, but I just wanted to say welcome to the forums =)
Good Luck.
Click to expand...

Thanks! Been lurking through here admiring places like the Network Gallery for quite some time. Finally had something I wanted to ask. :p
 
As far as ghosting is concerned, I'd look into using Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite. We use that here to ghost our staff PCs, as well as remotely ghosting all of our computer labs. In the past we used to walk around booting from floppy drives and hoping that our session would start properly, then we moved up to CDs, and now we are able to ghost an individual PC or entire lab without leaving our desk. It is relatively cheap too, but I'm not sure if that is because of our educational discount or not.
 
Just wanted to second a few suggestions that were already made. I think Untangle would work well for that environment, (although the AD integration is a billable feature which you may already have noticed). Couple that with OpenDNS like YeOldeStoneCat mentioned.

http://www.opendns.com/k12/solutions

Windows SteadyState also mentioned above might be helpful in preventing the need to ghost and restore. It looks like a good option, and the bonus is it's also free.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/seeit/classroom.mspx
 
Woo this could be all sorts of fun. Anyway as for the backend stuff, I would see if virtualizing would be right for you. It'll cut down on the need on hardware and be more efficient blah. If you haven't already implement a SAN. This will centralize storage, making it easier and cheaper to manage, maintain, upgrade.

As for the ghosting/deployment, Consider Altiris or KACE (www.kace.com)
 
that asus server is a good choice for untangle. I've got one protecting about a hundred college kids from themselves. Pretty much exact sames specs as that complete server except it has an 80GB drive and 2GB of RAM. I would NOT use that server for an exchange server. For something that important you are going to want hot-swappable drives, redundant fans and power supplies and a warranty with hardware replacement. I highly recommend HP's servers, look at the ML370 G5. You could install ESXi on it for free and setup a dedicated exchange server and a separate DC, separate print server, etc.

SteadyState works well for keeping Lab computers running nicely. I have seen a few different school districts use it and they seemed to really like it.
 
I just used clonezilla to do disk to disk clone on a laptop. they have server version for doing lan clones like ghost. you might check that out, it open source and free, too :D
 
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