Hey all,
Any advice would be greatly appreciated…
I’m not trained in anything, being still at school and only 17 but I do a lot of IT stuff for my dad’s business. He has recently bought an office (previously worked from home) and wants me to adminster his network there. Additionally he has offices at other sites which total to about 3.
What I am looking at is setting up a new lan for the new ofice and then linking all offices by VPN. I know most of what Microsoft has to offer (we run 2000 and 2003 servers) and I have recently been learning linux (Mandrake and Clarkconnect).
I need advice on the best way to organise these offices so that they can share files etc. I can set up a VPN tunnel using PPTP on Mandrake 10 and am working on sharing this connection on each LAN. I think if I install a VPN server at the main (new) office and install VPN clients (all running Mandrake) at each other office, I will be able to create one big network. Is this the case? How would I go about setting up DNS and WINs servers? I figure I will need one primary DNS server at the main site and a secondary DNS server at each other site. Can these replicate through the VPN tunnel?
As if that isn’t complicated enough, at the new office we will be leasing office space to other businesses, and they will require networking facilities. This includes networking between themselves, as well as access to our network ready printers. I thought that either subnetting or VLAN (if an inexpensive implentation can be found) to do this job. However, could these subnets access the printers while still providing security to our private network?
I am thinking of implementing IPs as follows
10.0.0.0 network 255.0.0.0 subnet
10 <-- network
10.0, 10.1, 10.2 <-- indicates which office
10.0.0, 10.0.1 <-- indicates whether server or workstation
10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2 <-- indicates actual host
Is this a viable naming system?
Even if you can't answer all my questions, individual pieces of advice no matter how small will help to make my first major network implementation a successful one.
Thanks, Nicholas