After sifting through many posts here, I decided to post my own question, and would appreciate any input you might have.
In our office, we run a Windows 2003 domain.
One of our clients (small business that isn’t so small anymore) now needs a real network and domain. The tricky piece here is that the clients offices are not climate controlled, and are no place for servers.
I have been tasked with setting up the client?s servers and domains in our office. The clients office desktops will need to connect to their servers sitting in our office for DHCP, files, and programs.
I’m curious about how to setup the IP scheme in our office, for our computers and servers, now that we will be adding their servers here.
I’m considering moving our office to an 11.11.0.0 scheme, while setting up the clients machines in a 12.12.0.0 scheme.
The forest/domain structure is still flexible, but I think it would be better to keep the forests separate, and setup trusts IF/when data needs to be shared. There should not be much of a need for my office computers to communicate with the clients servers. Except we will need access to their accounting data.
The connection between the offices will start as a VPN connection. Each office has a 3.5 Mbps link to the net. I have already posed the idea of a leased line, as I’m not sure if the current connections will be fast enough for the software to be used. The idea there is to see how well the current speeds work before upgrading.
I?ve setup a few DHCP servers in the past, but never anything quite this involved. I?m not sure how if I should be running two DHCP and DNS servers or some combination of the two. The fact that the client?s server, as well as our servers and desktops, need access to the internet means they will be connected to the same physical network. What problems will this pose, and suggestions for solutions are definitely appreciated here.
At the start, there will be between 10-15 users at the client office that will need to access accounting software data on one of the servers here. There may be a couple more people that will store files on the file server, but will not access them very much. We are still in the process of selecting an accounting suite, so I don’t have any more detailed info on that yet.
Again, any thoughts would be appreciated.