Firstly, DHCP can be setup to always give the same IP address to the same computer. Its quite handy.
A nice alternative for new expensive licensing is thin clients - either using Windows 2000 Advanced Server and getting as many licenses as you need (possibly cheaper than upgrading all clients), or if you have existing Windows 95/98/ME licenses Win4Lin Terminal Server (WTS) could be an option. WTS reccommends around a 900Mhz P3 (or better), 2Gb Ram and 60Gb of SCSI storage for a 25 user server. If you're thinking of moving your desktops over to linux, one option to think about is the thin client option, such as LTSP (ltsp.org) which would require around a 1Ghz machine for 20 odd uses. If you choose a dual processor option you could quite comfortably run both the WTS and LTSP on a two 1G Intel processors, you'd want a little more oomph with AMD. I've recently setup a few networks using LTSP and have found it to be an ideal solution that works older hardware, one of the networks is 15 diskless 486's running from a Duron 900 server, and accessing a Windows 2000 server using rdesktop. At one stage we had all machines booting and running rdesktop so the users didnt even know linux existed. As others have mentioned, smoothwall is a good bet for your gateway/firewall, from what I've seen and heard its a nice easily manageble soluton for those who dont want to dive in the deep end :) For the accounting software, one of my companies clients runs Attache under WinE quite successfully, but I have no experience with native software. Lastly, if you'd upgraded your server last month it probably would have cost a lot less. From what I've seen the prices have about doubled since August 1 - guess why our clients are slowly moving operations over to linux ;) Sascha On Wed, 2002-08-28 at 11:01, Gerard van Antwerpen wrote: > Hi all, > I'm trying to get some people overhere onto the Linux path. > I would like to start by giving everybody that needs it access to the net, > which for the moment is dial-up (in future probably jetstream or so). > I have just installed Slackware 8 on a 486 with 16mb ram, 1000 mb hdd > ,modem and nic. All working fine. > > We have about 20 machines, running MS os'es (95, 98, NT4, 2000, etc). Our > main file and accounting software server is running NT4 Server. > This machine issues IP numbers (dhcp). > I've got some good docs on setting up the dial-up etc for the MS clients. I > want to restric the net-access to certain clients only, is there a way of > getting the dchp info form the NT server to the linux box so I can regulate > access through the gateway? Or do I have to replace the dchp with static > numbers? > The same problem will still apply if we get the permanent net connection of > course. > > We are looking at upgrading our server shortly: got some quotes. Amazing > the cost of the licenses alone! (I don't have to spell out who we are > paying these licenses to I suppose ;-) ). > Are there any people that have experience with accounting applications on > Linux? (must be according to the articale last week in the Press). > Thanks >
