Networking our two offices. Have a few questions.

[Xcellere]

Our company is a High Rise Construction Consulting firm. We have an office in CT and one in Brooklyn, NY. My questions are pretty simple.

There are three PCs in the Brooklyn office, and two computers in the CT office. How hard would it be to network all five computers? We want to have it where the documents on the computers in the Brooklyn office can be accessed by the CT computers. What would need to be done? All computers will be running XP Pro.

We'll be running programs like Excel and Quickbooks mainly.

 

[azev]

VPN can do this.

 

[erwos]

Another, easier solution is a server with WebDAV encrypted via SSL that people mount as a local share. Employees will need to be more careful of where they store their documents, of course, and there is some authentication stuff to be written out. Still, it can be simpler than VPN.

It's also easier to back up a single webDAV share than five computers

-Erwos

 

[Xcellere]

So WebDAV is installed onto our server, and then the two PCs here in CT can remotely login to the server in Brooklyn?

 

[LBmtb]

I'd say do VPN. Could also share pritners so that way you cut down on fax costs too (just select network printer and print straight to the other office).

 

[JackMDS]

There are few ways to do so and which one to use might depends on the type of the server, security, and few other factors. Take them all into consideration before you risk your prime Network.

All computers are running WinXP? I.e. you do not have a server but a peer to peer Network?

You might want to consider changing to a server environment.

In any case this can help to automate the whole thing.

http://www.southrivertech.com/index.php?pg=./products/webdrive/index

:sun:

 

[Xcellere]

Each of the five computers will be running Windows XP Pro. There will be a server (a brand new Dell sever) in the Brooklyn office.

 

[nick128]

what kind of hardware is already in place as far as networking gear? if you're willing to invest get a pair of routers that will support VPN tunnels and put one at each location put a firewall behind each one (a cheap Cisco PIX would be my choice but even the cheap ones are still pricy) and config the routers to maintain a secure VPN tunnel between them. May be a pain if you use dynamic IPs at your locations, but probably the easiest, albeit not the cheapest, to implement.

 

[nweaver]

you could also be cheap and use 2 *nix boxes with a secure tunnel. Pix would be best though.

 

[Tsaico]

I would say hold onto your data, a single datawarehouse is less likely a target than a place like WebDev. As far as a solution for you, I would say a single file server that everyone uses as a "home directory" The office that has three computers will now have four, and the office that has two will VPN to a share on it. Since I presume you won't have a DC on this little network, just change where the "My documents" points to so everything is still in one place, where you can back up people's documents, recover etc. They just need to make sure they have a good internet connection for the vpn.

 

[Xcellere]

Originally posted by: nick128
what kind of hardware is already in place as far as networking gear? if you're willing to invest get a pair of routers that will support VPN tunnels and put one at each location put a firewall behind each one (a cheap Cisco PIX would be my choice but even the cheap ones are still pricy) and config the routers to maintain a secure VPN tunnel between them. May be a pain if you use dynamic IPs at your locations, but probably the easiest, albeit not the cheapest, to implement.

The two computers in the CT office are connected to a Linksys Cable/DSL BEFSR41 router. As for the Brooklyn office, nothing is setup at the moment, so whatever you guys recommend we'll go for.

 

[irwincur]

Best practice would probably suggest that a site to site VPN would be the way to go. It really is not all that expensive.

However, I would also definitely recommend getting a server in there also.

 

[JackMDS]

I would go with Windows 2003 SBS with ISA server, and organize with it the LAN and the WAN.

Link to: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/default.mspx

:sun: