Hello,
I support a small office that is 8 hours away from me. It’s a small family business and my father asked me to help out with their network duties. They don’t have anyone at their location who knows anything about computers or hardware (and unfortunately no one is interested in learning how to do this either) so if anything goes wrong with their system, they look to me to fix it. I’ve built a lot of backups into their network (Backup every image for every PC, each type of PC hardware has a backup unit that can be dropped in, spare router and switches, extra network cable, every PC has a UPC battery backup unit, etc).
They did buy a decent server with a raid 10 configuration, batery backup on the raid controller and hot swappable drive cage. The server is primarily used as a datastore for an application they run throughout the office. The database for this application lives on the server and I take nightly backups of the database. They are pretty covered in case something does happen. The only thing I really wish they had was a drive cage with extra drives that would be mounted automatically by their 3ware controller. But if anything happened hardware wise to their server or the raid controller, it would be difficult for me to get to their location quickly and fix it. I could move their database to another server that isn’t raid controlled for a temporary basis so they can continue working, but I would need to physically be there to look at what happened to their main server
So I’ve been thinking of running their server at one of the owners houses that is more near to me. I’m wondering what I would need to set this up, and also if anyone thinks this would be a good idea.
I’m using Untangle (Untangle.com) as the office’s router. Untangle has the ability to setup a dedicated VPN connection between sites. If both locations had a business internet connection, could I setup their main server at the house and have their office connect to that server? I’m worried about downtime or power failures that might cause disruption.
Anyway, I’ve babbled enough…what are your thoughts on this.
Thanks!
