Small Office Network

Mighty_Mouse

Hey
I'm lookingfor some advice. I recently set up a network for our company (small SME). The network is working fine at the moment etc

I have been asked to put a huge folder of documentation from one of our residental office PC's harddrive onto the company network to allow access to the documentation from every office PC.

Whats the capacity of the network. Will if crash? If it does i'm fecked cause i'm pretty much figuring it out as I go along here. A few more questions:

- will it slow down broadband access?
- will it slow down access to network
- how do you figure out network capactiy
-any other considerations need to be thought of

thanx for any advice I get

Ripwave

Mighty_Mouse wrote:

folder of documentation from one of our residental office PC's harddrive onto the company network

What exactly do you mean? Are you talking about someone working from home sharing documents of their hard drive over a VPN of some sort?

The obvious issue is that RADSL is only 128k up, so it's going to be a lot slower to access those files if the "server" is at the wrong end of the DSL link.

ressem

Can you clarify?

You're looking to share a large folder over the office network, by copying them onto an office server.
Or are you just using an office desktop?

Your network equipment so far is something like a small 8port switch/router combo+ PC cards and cabling?

Is your question whether it's feasible to send the documents over DSL? In which case

• your internet connection will be slow while the transfer is in progress.
• your broadband providers at office side and residental side will probably have limits on how much data you can transfer before they charge extra.

Or is the question about how your network will cope after the documents are within your network?

In which case, I'll assume you are using a switch not a hub (a hub wastes internal network bandwidth by broadcasting all traffic to every connection, not what you want)
If the documents shared, then accessing the document server might slow down the speed of someone elses access or printing on the same machines. It won't make a huge difference to internet access speed generally.

How many computers are you looking at?

If you're making major use of the document repository then using desktop windows on the file server will mean that you hit MS imposed limits on the number of computers that can access the share at a time and low performance. In which case you could look at using a dedicated file server with linux, windows server, or something like
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20040629/index.html

Capt'n Midnight

Are the files being shared on the local network (easy - NT/2K/XP workstations allow up to 10 concurrent connectoins) or are you sharing to/from the internet ?

if sharing to / from the internet security is very important. Also since you would be essentially downloading every file (and ADSL upload speed is a lot less than download) it will be SLOOOOWWWWW if you aren't using small files.

sceptre

Mighty_Mouse wrote:

Whats the capacity of the network.

What do you mean? If you mean "what's the capacity of the hard drive on the server", we don't know. if you mean "what speed is the network running at" we don't know either.

I'd be pretty careful about doing anything at all because, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, you clearly haven't got a clue of what you're doing and it might be advisable to get someone in who does and pay them. I'm taking the "will it crash" question as the most obvious example of this. While what you're doing is simpler than tying up a few shoelaces, from your point of view, playing with your employer's important data is the equivalent of playing with fire and if you screw it up you'll get burned.

I'm sure any of us that are in Galway regularly (including me) would happily drop in and have a look but while some of us would come cheap we wouldn't come for free. Does your company even have any of its important data backed up?

At least post a few more details on what you do know so you can be helped with what (at the moment) you reckon you don't.

Mighty_Mouse

How would the network cope with the documents if put onto the network?

There are 5 pc's , a ethernet hub, firewal etc

We want to put 1000' word documents into the network folder.(approx 25 mb)
Will this have an impact on the network speed, accessing speed etc.


The data is backed up

sceptre

Mighty_Mouse wrote:

How would the network cope with the documents if put onto the network?

It'd cope fine. It's only 25 megs of data in fairness.

Will this have an impact on the network speed, accessing speed etc

Yeah, it'll have an impact but not in the way you're afraid of. At the moment you seem to have a motorway available with nothing travelling on it (what are you currently using the network for if you're not sharing documents?). You're talking about putting a few cars on it so yeah, traffic will be higher but it's only 25 megs of data being shared between 5 PCs. Internet access won't be affected at all - even if you're currently using the network to share that your network is (hopefully) far faster than your net access.

Assuming you're using decent cat5 or 6 cabling, the speed of your network is essentially limited by the speed of the hub (which will be marked on the hub, though it's probably capable of doing 100Mps anyway) and the cards in your PCs

Mighty_Mouse

Thanks Sceptre.

Yes im using a cat 5 twisted ethernet cable. 100mps hub. The cards in the PC's are in-built. (Dell pc's and laptops)


Final question. Can somebody from a remote office get access to our office network? If so how.


Thanx again

Capt'n Midnight

If you have internet access you need a firewall between the network and the internet. - If you have broadband then make sure all the firewall features on the ADSL unit are turned on.

If you have a usb unit on a windows PC, then double plus ungood.

Maybe you meant how can someone from Our remote office access our network without third parties accessing either office ??? It depends on what internet is in both offices and what hardware is in use.

If the other office has a modem and you do too then you could setup RAS with dialback to a preset number. - not 100% safe but resonable enough...



Please give some details when asking questions !