Advice on small gigabit network for students

Hi Guys (and ladies)
I am about to start planning a small network of macs for use by a local college. There are only 20 students. I plan to have a Mac Pro for server and 5 networked clients for use by the students. There will also be another client in the office for admin use.
I plan to set up the student machines as follows:
4x iMac (Intel) for general word processing, DTP and internet research.
1x Mac G4 MDD for video editing using iMovie and iDVD.
The Admin machine will use MS Office and Sage accounting software under Parallels.
I planned on having the Student computers booting from the server so that they (the students) could not interfere with the setup of the OS and allowing any foul ups to be cancelled by a reboot. Each student would have a home directory on the main server.
My query is this:
The student need to use digital photos for their work - proably using iPhoto as their digital album. Would the uploading of photos into their respective home folders impact on the network or would everything be able to cope or would local storage be better?
I figured that the home folders would be safer on the server (using a mirrored hard drive) rather than trying to implement a network back up system.
Individual machines would be a nightmare to administer because each machine would need setting up manually and with all the user accounts duplicated on each machine and therefore a students work would only be available from that one machine.
The G4 MDD would be used only for video editing so each student could save their iMovie projects on a mirrored HDD on that machine only. Do you think running iMovie or iDVD over the network would be problematic?
So many questions!!!
Finally, What is the best way, in your opinions, to police internet use by the students? I know that OSX client can limit the sites accessible by an account holder but each individual web address has to be configured for the account. Has OSX Server got a facility to allow access to only certain sites that is maybe not quite so restrictive but equally easy to set up?
Your opinions on how you would set this up would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards
Dean

>The student need to use digital photos for their work - proably using iPhoto as their digital album. Would the uploading of photos into their respective home folders impact on the network or would everything be able to cope or would local storage be better?
Any network traffic has the potential to impact other users on the network. Whether or not you're generating enough traffic is the issue.
If the users are running typical digital camera-based images of a few megabytes each you should be OK. If they're playing with multi-gigabyte images in things like PhotoShop then that would be a different issue.
>I figured that the home folders would be safer on the server (using a mirrored hard drive) rather than trying to implement a network back up system.
Mirrored hard drives are NOT a viable backup solution.
A mirror drive won't prevent some user from acceidentally deleting a file and calling you for help.
A mirrored drive won't protect users from file corruption.
What a mirror drive will do is protect you from a single disk failure on the server, and give you a single point to backup (rather than multiple clients), but you still need some kind of backup plan.
>Individual machines would be a nightmare to administer because each machine would need setting up manually and with all the user accounts duplicated on each machine and therefore a students work would only be available from that one machine.
Correct.
>The G4 MDD would be used only for video editing so each student could save their iMovie projects on a mirrored HDD on that machine only. Do you think running iMovie or iDVD over the network would be problematic?
Am I missing something? Why does this need to be a MDD (unless you already have the MDD and are looking for some use for it).
As for whether it's a problem or not, it comes back to the volume of traffic you're driving. Most iMovie projects tend to be small, so you may be OK.
> What is the best way, in your opinions, to police internet use by the students
How old are the students?
Seriously. If they're high school or elementary, fair enough, but if they're college grade you're probably wasting your time.
That said, the typical solutions tend to hinge around proxy servers that all web traffic has to pass through. Access controls on the proxy server limit which sites can and cannot be accessed. Mac OS X Server comes with a proxy server built into Apache, but there are other (better?) proxies available, both commercial and open source.
If you're like many school districts you should probably check with the school network admins for policy referrals to make sure that whatever you do fits within district guidelines.

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