At 03:37 PM 29/05/2011, rds731@... wrote:

>I am a music teacher with a music computer lab to administer. I have
>received two pieces of software that will be very useful to us but am
>having trouble getting my IT folks to get them installed.
>
>We have about 20 Win XP pro machines to set up that are part of a larger
>network for a large school district. The new software will run as a
>standalone on each machine if needed but to be the most effecient, it
>needs to be installed on a server with Firebird.
>
>I am asking my IT folks to use the teacher station at the front of the
>class as the server for the machines in the classroom but they seem to
>dislike that idea. They say it won't work with Win XP pro. They say that
>a server version of WIN XP needs to be installed.

It's not true. Firebird will run on XP Pro. The question is whether your teacher machine has enough resources to support 20 concurrent users. Unless your IT guys are being utter pillocks on principle, perhaps that is their way of telling you that you *don't* have enough resources there.

> They also say Firebird needs a machine of its own; that it can't share a server with other software.

Certainly any database server does not want to have to compete for resources. If you have to use the teacher machine to run other applications, especially hungry ones, at the same time you want to serve data to 20 clients, then you can expect things to be slow. But you're not telling us anything informative about what that machine of yours is or does.

>I have the impression that either they don't know how or don't want to
>bother with this but since I'm not well versed in setting up networks,
>I'm looking for some information to help them figure this installation
>out.

From the little you have told us, "networks" is not the problem. Presumably your teacher machine and the students' machines are all part of a subnet, i.e., you are already communicating with one another. I would not be surprised to learn that your IT guys know the Music Dept has all the old machines that the Tech Departments have dumped, so they know that your 1990-vintage 486 can't take it. It would be nice to rule that out, though - do you have enough Windows knowledge to look up the specifications of your teacher machine? CPU and RAM; also operating system service pack level.

>So,
>
> 1. Can Firebird be run on a standard WIN XP Pro machine or does it
>need a server version of WIN XP?

Doesn't need Server 2003: the operating system per se is not your barrier. You need to find out whether you have (or can get) the resources to let the OS do the job.

> 2. Can a Firebird network be run on a classroom network within a
>larger district-wide network?

Yes: all you need to know is the IP address or Windows node name of your teacher machine.

>I need to be able to ask intelligent questions and offer good solutions,
>so any information anyone can offer is greatly appreciated.

Start off by asking about your machine's resources and get back to the list with some intelligent *answers*, first. Then, people here will be able to tell you whether you have a convincing case or a lost cause.

./heLen