Evan Plaice's questions

Bounty 100 rep coming: I know I'm asking a lot here and I'd like a detailed/quality answer so, as soon as I am able, I'll be adding a 100 rep bounty to this question.

I'm trying to illustrate the problem of this setup to my superiors but I'm not a professional system administrator; So, I figured I'd ask the pro sysadmin community for some backup on this one.

The configuration consists of:

• 3 Promise Pegasus R6 configured as Raid 50 arrays chained via a Thunderbolt (copper) interface
• A Mac Mini server running as a dedicated file server
• A Cisco 4900M Catalyst switch (don't ask ::sigh::)
• 3 iMac Workstations
• 2 Dell Laptop Workstations
• 3 Xerox Production Printers

Here's a little background. The workstations are dedicated to professional graphic design and video editing and the storage array's primary purpose is to act as a data repository for the workstations.

What I'd like to know is, what is the maximum theoretical throughput of the connection from a workstation to the storage array broken down into simple terms (Kilobytes/s Megabytes/s).

Note: Brownie points if you can illustrate a NAS (Network Attached Storage) setup with equal or better throughput.

Update:

For those who are curious, the controllers are Promise Pegasus R6. You can find the spec sheet here.

This may seem like a strange question because it involves a non-traditional approach.

What I'm looking for is a standard rackmount cooling/humidity control module. The idea is to build a portable server rack (in a case) that can be deployed to the field but limit the cooling/temperature control requirements to just the case that the server gear is contained in.

I understand that the chiller may warm it's surrounding environment so, as an additional approach, it will be possible to have a separate case for the chiller alone.

1. Do these exist?

2. What are they called?

3. Where can I find one?

I have a large batch of laptops that all have identical hardware. Right now each laptop has its own backup image (ie Norton Ghost) that contains the installed OS as well as all the relevant software.

What I'd like to do is create a master base image that can be loaded onto any of the laptops but requires the product keys to be installed when the system is initially booted.

Is there a built-in way to invalidate the install to force a re-activation and/or can Windows be installed in a pre-activation state to meet the same requirement.

Currently, with updates and software install it can take 5-7 hours to create each image so anything I can do to cut down on that time will save a ton of time on deployments/re-imaging.

Note: Assume that all of the laptops are distributed geographically so leveraging a central network for deployments is not an option.

I simply cannot believe this is quite so hard to determine.

Even having read the RFCs, it's not clear to me if a server at subdomain.example.com can set a cookie that can be read by example.com.

subdomain.example.com can set a cookie whose Domain attribute is .example.com. RFC 2965 seems to explicitly state that such a cookie will not be sent to example.com, but then equally says that if you set Domain=example.com, a dot is prepended, as if you said .example.com. Taken together, this seems to say that if example.com returns sets a cookie with Domain=example.com, it doesn't get that cookie back! That can't be right.

Can anyone clarify what the rules really are?