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Small network: Would a server be beneficial?

post #1 of 7
6/22/06 at 4:21pm
Thread Starter 
I work at a biological research station with a total of about 20 computers. Currently the town I am in has no quality internet offerings (only dial-up), so we have installed a wifi antenna in a house in another town some 10 miles across a bay, installed a 600kbps adsl line there (that's the best they have to offer) and another antenna here that is connected to a hub and sharing the conection with all the PC's. A technichian that came the other day recommended we put in a server but couldn't seem to explain what there is to gain from having one. Our website and email are both run through university servers on the main campus. There is a very small amount of file sharing between the PC's, probably on the order of a few MB/day that up to now have been easily done through windows network or carrying the data around in a USB drive. So my question is what would the benefits be of installing server?
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post #2 of 7
6/22/06 at 4:35pm
I believe all the benefit would go to the wallet of the guy that said you need a network. He also offered to install it for you guys right?
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post #3 of 7
6/22/06 at 4:46pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dman22
I believe all the benefit would go to the wallet of the guy that said you need a network. He also offered to install it for you guys right?
It was one of the tech's from an ISP that I was talking to about trying to get a dedicated line put in, which turned out to be way too expensive (more than 6 times what I pay a month in rent for a 1mb line). We never even discussed who would set it up. He just recommended we get one at my work.

/edit: (sorry I forgot to mention this) I guess part of it would be to be able to connect to the University's server and become part of the University network. But as long as we are using an adsl line, we're going to have a dynamic IP and the admin at the University won't let us into the network without a fixed one.
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post #4 of 7
6/22/06 at 6:49pm
first off, you don't want to be restricted by the University policies, so I wouldn't even connect it to them if you had a server, just use it for the 20 local computers. Unless you absolutely need to be hot with the Univ. server, stay away from it.

secondly, you only need a server if you have some type of decent file sharing, file transfer, or RAM-heavy tasks you want to offload from the desktops.
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post #5 of 7
6/22/06 at 6:50pm
From what you wrote I don't really see a big enough advantage to get a server.
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post #6 of 7
6/22/06 at 6:53pm
What Dman said, it's a waste. Reasons one might need a server:

1. To have a central location for storing files and accessing others data
2. Performance for applicatoins like SQL, or Oracle.
3. The need to use 8 to 32 processors for major number crunching
4. High availibilty
5. Proxy or routing appliance if you did not have hardware for that
6. Email server
7. Print server
8. Virtualization platform
9. Software distributiuon system

There are a million other uses, however it seems like the system you have is working fine for you.
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post #7 of 7
6/22/06 at 7:16pm
Thread Starter 
Cool. Thanks everyone. I appreciate the imput. My advisor (station director) has been pressing me to find out what we would get out ot it and the university IT guy doesn't answer me. Apparently nothing worthwhile at this point. Some of the features could be useful (centralizing data storage and backups, probably even offloading tasks from individual desktops/ heavy number crunching), but it'd probably have to be once there's somebody here that knows how to get and keep it up and running and the cost wouldn't be worth it right now.
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