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<BR><BR><BR>ok thanks for the clarification, I wasn't trying to sound like an ass in my previous message. I just know at my employer I've had users who think they know how to fix computers (but all they can do is break them) do more harm then good, but since we went to roaming profiles/active directory/etc a few years ago when I started steering the ship, I and made them all regular users and only IT support staff are administrators, that ended the problems.<BR><BR>Xen is always good for saving power. It's similar to VMWare, you can run multiple virtual computers on one PC at once. So you could create yourself a Linux server on an already existing computer. Some of VMware's products are free, like ESX server, too, so you might look into that.<BR><BR>Does each school have a firewall at their perimeter? Are they networked together via a VPN, or wide area network? Is your bandwidth billed by the gigabyte or unlimited, and how fast are the school's connections and # of computers? You could put your file server in a DMZ on your firewall and have all school computers update from it (but that may not be a good idea depending on how much bandwidth and computers your schools have and how much you are billed for bandwidth, or do it only at schools with no server). But you could keep your current setup and just have the remote servers grab the latest config and packages with ssh+rsync.<BR><BR>
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We're a long way from that typically. My main site sits on a 100MBit fibre but the feeder schools are all on 2MBit DSL so syncing stuff or installing over the Internet would be painfully slow and not reliable. They're also not on a WAN for the curriculum side of things either. None have a PC which is on 24/7 hence my use of 'cheaper' NAS devices which are more than capable of handling their needs and can double as central file storage too. Nothing is ideal and it's a case of matching cost and effectiveness more often than not!<BR>
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Chris<BR><br /><hr />Share your photos with Windows Live Photos – Free. <a href='http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/134665338/direct/01/' target='_new'>Try it Now!</a></body>
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