Quake3World

I'm prepping a short report for a small office that needs an overhaul on their PC systems... Looking for input and ideas on good ways to update their systems and make things a bit more professional.

Currently they have a handful of workstations, in various states of decay (between 1.3 and 3Ghz), a regular home ADSL connection, and files are mostly served from the most powerful PC via a network share.

All the PCs are running XP Home (argh) and there's currently no data backup happening.

First thing I did when I went in is to backup to a DVD, so short-term they're fine. But we're looking at what to do in the longer term. Way I see it, there's several options:

1. Upgrade one of the PCs, then use the old PC as a hacked together 'server'. Bung a DVD Burner in it and have it do regular backups.

2. Buy a proper server tower, RAID 4 drives, install Server 2003, a DVD-Burner, and serve files, printers and backup off the box.

3. Buy a new desktop tower with XP Pro, and do #2 but on the cheap.

Input plz. Also, Server 2003's licensing is a horribly mystery to me. I can get a copy of SBS Standard with 5 CALs for about £300, but I don't know if this is enough to enable me to do what I need to do for the above, legally. Licensing has never been my thing..

if they're really small then maybe a network attached storage thing would do?

dumped the file and print servers in favour of 2 NAS boxes a little while back. One acts as the file and print server, the other is virtually identical and mirrors for redundancy - it also copies the nightly backups to a usb drive and syncs on a throttled connection with the co-lo server up north. minimal setup and maintenance.

bit lo-tech, but it's been working fine so far.

That sounds like a nice solution.

There was some stuff I didn't mention and should do, which made me think NAS might be too low-fi. There's some talk of setting up VPN from this office to a remote office, also.. and they'll need a box capable of handling that. I should have asked in the original post too... but if someone could point me at VPN options for a small business, I'd be very interested too. I'm guessing I could hack something up with Hamachi or this OpenVPN thing, but I've not looked into the latter and the former seems a bit unprofessional (god I hate that term).

The NAS might still be an option though... the printers in the office are kinda random so I'm not sure I'd be able to find a solution for the printers via that route...

aye, you'd still need a gateway box for firewalling, vpn'ing etc,. but an old box would be okay for that. if their printers aren't centrally managed already then don't change anything. can't suggest a vpn solution. another place i work at has just started looking for one because sonicwall doesn't work on vista yet.

not pimping a specific solution btw, just trying to put off some work that i've now resigned myself to get on with

Looks like SBS server will do a lot of what's needed if i slapped it on a dedicated machine.. Though I'm assuming I can use it to act as a gateway with VPN support if I also have another SBS server running at the remote site... I'll just be able to link the two together without needing a hardware VPN solution?

Foo wrote:Looks like SBS server will do a lot of what's needed if i slapped it on a dedicated machine.. Though I'm assuming I can use it to act as a gateway with VPN support if I also have another SBS server running at the remote site... I'll just be able to link the two together without needing a hardware VPN solution?

Not the best solution.

If it was me I'd set up the SBS server to be the primary DC and host the master FSMO roles (it'll do that by default), files, print, email, etc. Remember when setting up SBS and administering it to use the wizards for EVERYTHING! Host your OS on a mirror set and your Exchange store, logs, and data on a RAID5 set. Then put a hardware firewall/VPN endpoint in and do the same at the remote office (SBS and Server 2003 CAN do this but don't do it well unless that's all the box is doing in my experience). If the remote office only has a few stations at the remote office set up Office 2003 or 2007 to use Cached Exchange Mode and the users can use the VPN for Outlook and file/print.

If the remote office hosts more than 5 stations drop a second server in, setup a new site in AD Sites & Services, and drop the new server into that new site (remember to create and assign a subnet to each site). Then make the secondary server a Domain Controller in your SBS forest (there are KB documents on how to do this, make abso-fucking-lutely SURE you read them and follow them to a "t"), Once that is done make the new DC a global catalogue server so that it can authenticate users in the remote office without having to hit the WAN.

If the network is on a budget I would use the built-in NTbackup which will do alright especially since SBS 2003 has the recovery store option for mailbox recovery. If the client has some cash though I'd recommend BackupExec for SBS 2003 which has all the agents you need.

If you have any questions on server licensing or anything else let me know either here or via email.

Budget is too tight for a HW firewall unfortunately.

Also most of the workstation are on XP home, as mentioned. So without bumping the cost up significantly upgrading workstations to Pro, a domain is out of the question too.

Hmm another related question.. can SBS handle a mixed environment and how far can I integrate workstations which will not have their own CAL?

What I mean is, once I get a domain up and running with the 5 XP Pro workstations authenticating, is there a method by which I can make network shares on the SBS box available to non-domain workstations, and would this have any licensing issues?

Also, with the remote sites I'm now thinking that remotely logging in to sharepoint might be a good way of doing things. Would there need to be unassigned CALs for the remote sessions, or are these handled seperately?

I'll have to look into more CALs, if I bump the number to 10 then I'm definitely in the clear. But I may get away with 5, as you mentioned it's concurrent users and that's going to be less than the total number of workstations in this case, as it's a kinda job-sharing situation where all the PCs are rarely in use at the same time, and even when they are the number of those that will be touching the server is less than the total.

Even so, another 5 licenses is going to rush them around £250, which isn't too bad.