Network advice wanted

[John Pettitt]

We are about to upgrade our engineering dept network, I am looking
for thoughts, suggestions, war stories from the net.

N.B. Other systems support office/admin use and are not subject to
change at the moment.

1) Background:

We have 14 (soon to be 20) people using a mixed network 
that looks like:

Server: bugs.specialix.co.uk
	486/25
	2G disk
	32 MB ram
	32 serial ports
	Used as NFS server and `home' system for everybody
Serever: arthur.specialix.co.uk
	386/25
	600 MB disk
	8 MB ram
	8 serial ports
	News, Mail, modem server, primary name server, backup server (exabyte)
Clients: flopsy, mopsy, bunny, pipkin, peter, bungie, wig, dylan
	UNIX clients - these are development targets - they have
	a volatile, non secure, operatin environment.
Clients: bigwig, hazel, cottontail, roger, thumper
	PC/NFS clients (transputer development support, PCB CAD etc)
Clients: fred
	Xterminal

Most of the software development is for 386/486 targets and so whatever
is used as a compute server must be able to generate ?86 code.

2) Expansion

We would like to move from dumb terminals to a GUI environment (probably X).
We are out of performance on bugs (load average peaks > 10)

We are considering:
a)  A multi processor 486 (Compaq ?)
    Xterminals
b)  A Sparc or MIPS based file server
    One or more 486 `compute' servers
    Xterminals
c)  A Sparc or MIPS based file server
     A 386 PC for each engineer

3) Questions

What is the collective wizdom of the net on the above ?
Will we be out of ethernet bandwidth with any of the above ?
Should we consider workstations (is the extra cost worth it ?)


Please reply by mail 
-- 
John Pettitt, Specialix International, 
Email: jpp at specialix.com Tel +44 (0) 9323 54254 Fax +44 (0) 9323 52781
Disclaimer: Me, say that ?  Never, it's a forged posting !