new setup for school

Guest · Oct 25, 2003

We're a small school in a poor rural area of Southern Missouri. We've just had several donors wire our schoolrooms and one lab with Cat5 cable. They've given us a HP Procurve Switch (48 ports) and a Baystack HUB for our lab (16 ports).

Plus they gave us a very nice Windows 2000 Server (2 nic cards). We've just had cable modem service run to the school and our cable modem is sitting next to our server. Everything's plugged into the switch.

I've got pretty good experience with Windows peer networks, and I understand DHCP, but have never configured a DHCP server. The school doesn't have money to hire a MSCE to come configure everything for us. I've got an A+ cert and lots of practical experience, but not in NT-style networking. All we really want is for some of the computers in the classrooms to get the internet.
Can anyone recommend resources, books, web-sites, etc. where I might find a recipe for setting up the Win2k server to share the Internet and provide IP addresses to the clients? Oh, the clients are mostly Win98 machines, with a few WinXP Home and WinXP Pro. Any advice would be helpful. I'm pretty isolated here.
Thanks,
Jim

Oli Restorick [MVP] · Oct 25, 2003

Hi there

I'll give you a little advice on connecting the machines to the Internet.

Although you can use things like Internet Connection Sharing to share the
Internet connection and that the second NIC might seem like a nice place to
plug that cable modem into, please don't do it.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that you'll be placing your
Windows 2000 Server directly on the Internet. If you don't keep up to date
with your patches, you'll be vulnerable to attacks like the Blaster worm.
Secondly, while some people have been known to get ICS working, others have
failed miserably to get any useful functionality from it. I fall into the
latter category. It really isn't worth the hassle.

I would suggest that you invest in a broadband router, the most basic of
which will set you back around $50. Linksys are well-known for selling
these boxes, like the BEFSR41. The cable-modem will plug into the router's
WAN port and you'll plug one of the 4 ports on the router's built-in switch
into your switch.

The other advantage is that these boxes have built-in DHCP servers. If you
were to make your 2000 server an Active Directory domain controller, I'd
recommend that you make your 2000 machine the DHCP server. However, for a
simple peer-to-peer setup the DHCP server on the router will be fine and
will be easier to set up.

Anyway, I hope this gives you a head-start and good luck.

Oli

academicpc said:
We're a small school in a poor rural area of Southern Missouri. We've

just had several donors wire our schoolrooms and one lab with Cat5 cable.
They've given us a HP Procurve Switch (48 ports) and a Baystack HUB for our
lab (16 ports).

Plus they gave us a very nice Windows 2000 Server (2 nic cards). We've

just had cable modem service run to the school and our cable modem is
sitting next to our server. Everything's plugged into the switch.

I've got pretty good experience with Windows peer networks, and I

understand DHCP, but have never configured a DHCP server. The school
doesn't have money to hire a MSCE to come configure everything for us. I've
got an A+ cert and lots of practical experience, but not in NT-style
networking. All we really want is for some of the computers in the
classrooms to get the internet.

Can anyone recommend resources, books, web-sites, etc. where I might find

a recipe for setting up the Win2k server to share the Internet and provide
IP addresses to the clients? Oh, the clients are mostly Win98 machines,
with a few WinXP Home and WinXP Pro. Any advice would be helpful. I'm
pretty isolated here.

Oli Restorick [MVP] · Oct 25, 2003

I forgot to mention. If you invest a bit more in the router, some of the
home/small business ones are including firewall functionality. The network
address translation implemented in these boxes gives natural protection
inbound, but none outbound. The more advanced boxes may also allow you to
specify which PCs are able to connect to the Internet.

This is not an excuse not to apply the latest service packs and at least
some of the hotfixes, though.

Regards

Oli