Gah, I feel like corrupted hell today. I've got no idea why, just woke up feeling awful. Some Tylenol and 50mg of Antivert later, I at least feel mostly human, but seriously, WTF? I hope I'm just seasick, I really don't wanna keep feeling assy all week.
On happier news, kitties! I now have a kittymew, or technically, my nakama does. Of course, by the time I actually get back she'll be mostly adult, but that's OK. I'm not one of those that thinks kittens are cute but disdains cats. She's a fuzzy little calico kitty, random-bred but with some odd features, like lynx tips that are pretty rare on shorthaired cats. American Shorthair and Abyssinian mix, maybe? Not at all sure.
Also, it's pretty pathetic for a server to go catatonic from the load produced by, at most, 95 users. Especially when the users are just doing basic file and authentication stuff, and the server's a dual Xeon with 3GB of RAM. This is sad, even over a 10Mbit network, even when the server runs Windows. In fact, considering that Windows 2003 Server is actually pretty solid in my experience, it's utterly sad. I blame the gimpy ATM drivers.
If it was up to me I'd rip out the dang servers and replace them with something useful. There's no particular reason why the servers must run Windows. The workstations, yes, for now, but not the servers. I'd set up a multiply-redundant rack with 10Gbit ethernet between them, and a meshed small SAN (either FC or 10Gbit Ethernet with iSCSI) between them for user files storage, allowing the ship to lose all but one rack without serious degradation. The servers would probably run Solaris, or perhaps Linux. Backups would be to a SAN-attached tape robot. The FS would be Lustre with a ZFS backend, probably, with at least hourly snapshots kept for two weeks or so. 1-2TB would be far more than enough to do that for a destroyer or cruiser. A carrier might need 20TB - not horrible, these days, especially since ridiculous-fast access is not a requirement, just fast enough. I'd also be tempted to use diskless workstations or some other netbooting trick, so that a return to standard-image configuration is just a reboot away.