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Chapter 5 Before You Begin 75
• Home directories for network users can be consolidated onto one server or
distributed among various servers. While you can move home directories if you need
to, you may need to change a large number of user and share point records, so
devise a strategy that will persist for a reasonable amount of time. See the user
management guide for information about home directories.
• Some services offer ways to control the amount of disk space used by individual
users. For example, you can set up both home directory and mail quotas for users.
Consider whether using quotas will offer a way to maximize the disk usage on a
server that stores home directories and mail databases. The user management guide
and mail service administration guide describe home directory and mail quotas,
respectively.
• Disk space requirements are also affected by the type of files a server hosts. Creative
environments need high-capacity storage to accommodate large media files,
whereas elementary school classrooms have much more modest file storage needs.
The file services administration guide describes file sharing.
• If you will be setting up a streaming media server, you’ll need to allocate enough disk
space to accommodate a certain number of hours of streamed video or audio. See
the QuickTime Streaming Server administration guide for hardware and software
requirements and for a setup example.
• The number of NetBoot client computers you can connect to a server depends on
the server’s Ethernet connections, the number of users, and other factors, and DHCP
services need to be available. See the system image administration guide for NetBoot
capacity planning guidelines.
• Mac OS X Server offers extensive support for Windows users. You can consolidate
Windows user support on servers that provide PDC services, or you can distribute
services for Windows users among different servers. The Windows services
administration guide describes the options available to you.
• If you want to use software RAID to stripe or mirror disks, you’ll need two or more
drives (they can’t be FireWire drives) on a server. See online help for Disk Utility for
more information.
Before finalizing decisions about which servers will host particular services, familiarize
yourself with information in the individual administration guides for services you want
to deploy.
Define a Migration Strategy
When you are using computers with Mac OS X Server versions earlier than 10.3,
consider updating them to version 10.3.
When you are using Mac OS X Server version 10.1 or 10.2, you can often simply upgrade
your server during the installation process. This approach is simple, because it
automatically preserves the data and settings you’ve been using.
LL2343.Book Page 75 Thursday, August 14, 2003 5:12 PM