Internet access for a school, any suggestions?

[NickParker]

Hi everybody,

I work for a school in the Fourways area which has roughly 1000 students (ranging from grade 0 -> matric) and around 250 staff.

Our current internet solution is:

1x 1MB Uncapped IS Account (for internet)
1x 512KB Uncapped IS Account (for mail)

This was great when we first got it, but we're starting to see some of the pitfalls of the solution:

- Our mail line seems to be suffering when it comes to newsletters/statment time, sending out 1000+ emails seems to kill our email going in and coming out for around 2 days. It's not possible for us to use a smart host as our school admin system generates each email (the statements, for example, are generated in PDF and password protected).

- Internet Line: There are an average of 15 - 20 people using the internet line at any one time, if a class goes into a lab, that shoots up to about 40, and if 2 labs are busy, anywhere up to 80 people sharing the 1MB line. I have tried to put cache servers in place, block high bandwidth sites etc etc... but in the end, it's just not enough.

My current thinking so far is:

Cancel the uncapped accounts, convert both lines to 4MB lines, get a dsl line load balancer and link the 2 lines. This would theoretically give us a maximum of 8MB downstream and 1MB upstream?
Cons: No more uncapped, will need to look into getting a high cap account, or a few smaller cap accounts and changing every few days. No more static IPs.

Does anybody else have any creative suggestions? I would really appreciate any help?

 

[Mean_Monster]

Hi,
The only problem I can see with cancelling both accounts is that you would then be running your mail on a dynamic ip. With the amount of spam going around, you might just pick up an ip that has been blacklisted, because of it being a source of spam when someone else leased that IP. So I would keep 1 Static IP Connection for e-mails and depending on the mail server that you have, schedule large messages for after hours. Also if using Acrobat Distiller to create the PDF's maybe have a look at the quality settings as these can inflate a PDF to a very silly size.

80 people on a 1 Meg would be a bit much, I guess. We run our company browsing on 1 x 4 Meg ADSL Line, but we have a caching server in place that helps a lot as a lot of users visit the same sites often, however if people are browsing randomly this can cause a bit of a problem. We use about 12 Gb a month with just browsing on the ADSL Line, so I don't know how that compares with your usage? Maybe this gives you an idea.

Some option you might want to look at is an ADSL Realm with someone like Verizon. That sort of makes you a "Virtual ISP" I guess. We create users and remove on our own realm and you can also set the caps as you like. You get billed per Meg usage with different rates for local and international. I am sure that 1 Meg Static IP Line would be a couple of bucks.

Just some thoughts.

 

[NickParker]

Thanks for your help!

You're right about the mailserver problem, it's something I will have to look into...
I'm busy generating the usage stats from our IS Customer Zone page, just taking a while, that should hopefully help me work out an accurate usage for a month, however, that'll be based on 1MB+512KB usage, sure to increase when/if we move to 8MB...

I will have a look at what Verizon can offer us!

Thanks again!

 

[HavocXphere]

See if you can't stagger the newsletters over 5 days or so & send them during the night and after school. This 2 day clogged lines thing sounds fishy to me. Do you guys put huge pictures into the pdfs or what? 1000 statements shouldn't clog a line for 2 days unless they have something funny in them.

Neotel keeps talking about "burstable bandwidth" that sounds like exactly what you need. Not to sure whether they can/want to provide a school with such a solution though.

My old school had about the same number of students and went trough about 20gigs per month. One 4mb line. But they also limited downloadable filesize to 1meg. Also had a cache server & some clever QoS.

 

[fragtion]

While still a student, I set up the internet for Maragon Private School in Ruimsig which they still use to this day, consisting of two ethernet DSL lines/modems and Telkom accounts, terminating in a Linux (Debian) server which is running a 60GB squid cache and round-robin switching between the two lines to give a good 800K/s average multithreaded output

 

[NickParker]

While still a student, I set up the internet for Maragon Private School in Ruimsig which they still use to this day, consisting of two ethernet DSL lines/modems and Telkom accounts, terminating in a Linux (Debian) server which is running a 60GB squid cache and round-robin switching between the two lines to give a good 800K/s average multithreaded output

Show off

That's the sort of thing I'm looking at doing... thanks so much for your suggestion!

Regarding the mail line being clogged, its not stand still, but mail just backs up and moves very slowly coming and going. We can't really stagger it, as the system generates everything in one go (it's a cruddy system, i know).
Anyways, thanks again for all your suggestions