Teams with Servers

[Isaac501]

Our sponsor is a major Internet Infrastruction-as-a-Service company, so they provide us with servers for our website and other purposes. They aren't inside the school's network, so they aren't limited by restricted access.

I personally use Linode at $20/month, and it serves all my web, dns, email and other needs.

[sanddrag]

Well, I got the server done and installed. It's a 2U half-depth Rackable Systems C2004 with twin Xeon 5150 Dual Core processors at 2.66GHz and 8GB of DDR2 RAM. I have four 1TB SATA drives in it on a ZFS filesystem in RAIDZ configuration under FreeNAS as the OS. FreeNAS is not quite as fully-featured and refined as I'd like it to be, but it's a good simple easy to use system that should be fairly reliable. It's working rather well. FreeNAS does has several nice features as opposed to other options. I have under $400 into the whole thing including tax and shipping, and that does include new drives (on sale/coupon). The CPUs are a bit overkill for just NAS, but I got the system at a good price. I'm pretty happy.

The next thing I want to look at is getting ahold of Vault server 2013 and experimenting with that.

[kiettyyyy]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

For teams with servers in their local labs, I want to hear from you. I'm particularly interested in those who have installed and managed their own servers. I want to know what purpose you use it for (NAS, Rendering, etc), what it's running, what hardware it's on, etc etc, all the details.

I'm also curious about the intricacies of getting in ad out of the school network (remote access).

I'm looking to expand our options beyond the current model of workstations, flash drives, and Dropbox.

Even if you don't have a server but are experienced in such things, I want to start a healthy discussion on what the ideal setup would be.

EDIT: I'm also interested in hearing from anyone running Autodesk Vault, and what people are using for a subversion server.

When I was previously on 968, I had setup a local machine that had a samba share that was replicated onto another machine in my datacenter via a SSTP VPN session.

We had CAD workstations that were connected to this network that shared drawings and miscellaneous documents to additional machines that were connected wirelessly to the same subnet. These computers were placed next to commonly used tools such as their mill and lathe. This allowed our students to machine parts without printing a single piece of paper.

CAD models were saved onto another server that I had in my datacenter that was also accessible via the existing VPN using Solidworks PDM workgroup server. This allowed people that were not on site to work on CAD models without much conflict.

In addition to our high school network setup, I also provided a method of connecting our practice field, which was 1.5 miles away from the HS, to the same network via 4G cellular services. Every device was easily accessible from either location. We were even able to access the cRIO on the practice field from the high school.

Let me know if you need any help from Vivid-Hosting

[craigboez]

In years past Server was a separate file/install, but this year it was included in our Inventor Ultimate suite executable. One of the first options gives you a choice to either Install or goto Options/Setup (dont remember the exact word) if you click Options it'll let you install Vault Server.

Not sure what the student version is like, but that was my experience with the paid version. Can't recommend Vault Server enough. It's irreplaceable for collaboration on CAD designs.

[sanddrag]

Can I use Vault server to save files to a location that is a mounted network share. The idea is that the files would exist on a separate NAS, but be managed by Vault. Would this work?