[olug] Initial Network Configuration

[Eric Penne]

I'm putting together a proposal for one of my clients (elementary and high
school) for the revamp of a network.  The network has approx. 150 PCs. 
The network needs expandability.  It will be a mixed OS network with Mac,
Win, and Linux.  There will be some LTSP clients (keyboarding lab), email,
fileserver, firewall, DHCP, internal authorative DNS, and external
forwarding DNS cache.  I want to have the email server behind the
firewall.  The webserver is hosted by the ESU IIRC.

My biggest concern is the network infrastructure.  The LTSP may or may not
be on the same switch as the LTSP clients.  The fileserver could see heavy
traffic.

Questions:
What is the difference between managed and unmanaged switches?

Some switches say 2k MAC address memory.  How could that affect the
performance?

What is a good layout for switches vs. clients and daisy chaining them
together?

Are there any good references on the web?  Good books to purchase?

This is for a school that is going through budget cuts and is looking at
Linux on the backend to save money, but also wants to make sure their
infrastructure is solid enough to last a few more years in case more
budget cuts happen.

Thanks
Eric Penne