Ok, here's the situation. Any help or input would be greatly appreciated.
The company I work for would like to completely rework their network, and I will probably be the one most involved with it, as I have the most networking experience here. Were a small business, with about 50 PC's that need to be networked. The current plan is to buy a server to do both our website and email, but also for filesharing. The web/email will not be too intensive, there isn't much web traffic, and there only about 25 people who will actively use email.
We use all PC's, and will most likely put Windows 2000 on them all. That is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to do with the file server. For a Windows 2000 license it will be about $2000. And that doesn't include the copies on each machine. I could buy a cheap AMD/Intel box and install Linux on it, which would be sufficient I think, but I would be the only one capable of maintaining the server. So I was thinking about a OS X Server. I know Apple claims that it integrates easily with Windows networks, is this really true, or are there any caveats? Any experience you might have with this would be great. A low end XServe for $3,000 is a deal when you consider that it comes with an unlimited client license.
And lastly, I don't know if this belongs here, but I will try anyway. We have 5 locations, and they need to be hooked into the file server at all times. I have no experience with this at all, all my networking experience has been single location stuff. Are there any good books or websites dealing with this specific area of networking?
Regards,
Ben
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