On Thu, 1 Feb 2001 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Thank you very much for all of your answers to our question
> "Centralized vs. distributed printing". They have helped us to set a
> clear idea that what we need is definitely is a centralized scheme,
> due to all of the advantages it implies.
>
> We are writing to you again to ask for some more advise. The problem
> we have now is we don't know where we shoud put the print server. We
> have a linux node (PIII, 256Mb, 10 Gb HDD) that runs a NIS server,
> Samba, mail server and a little web server, and the rest of nodes
> relay on this one (basicly due to NIS and mail services). We are not
> sure wether it would be a good idea to overload this node with the new
> print server service.
>
> We would like to hear your opinions of how have you integrated all of
> these services and how we could improve our fragile system (all relay
> on one box and if it falls we stop the productivity of more than 30
> people in the lab). We have about 25 linux and 8 windows.
>
> Andrew Morgan talked about a backup print server. Could you give us
> more info about how to implement it?
I wish I could say it was something sophisticated, but really we just have
a second server with the same software and config files, ready to run. If
there is some kind of serious failure on the primary machine, we could
bring up the second machine. Since all of our printing services come
through Samba or Netatalk, we don't even need to change dns names or ip
addresses to make the backup appear as the primary. The database server
which stores accounting information lives on a third machine.
We've been running this setup for close to two years now and haven't had a
single failure of the primary print server, except for a couple cases
where the database server had maxed out its connection limit. The print
server itself has only been "down" for occasional software upgrades,
usually done on off-hours.
Just for comparison, our print server is a P2-450 with 512MB of RAM. We
also run HP's WebJetAdmin software, the computer lab web server, Samba,
and Netatalk on the machine. It hardly ever breaks a sweat. I don't
think running the print server on it taxes the machine much. Mostly you
want fast networking so you can get those print jobs in and out of the
machine as fast as possible.
Andy
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