XP NETWORK HELP PLEASE

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What community or support option would best help me reconfigure my companies
network. I have 7 offices in various locations with about 10 PC's per
location. At each location I have a typical network with a cable modem or
other high speed service, a wireless router, and usually a switch or hub to
add the additional PC's. In the past this has worked with little or no
problems, save for the occasional downed device or virus. We are a high
speed internet installation company so I typically have someone in each
office who has enough savvy to troubleshoot and fix these type of issues.
Our network is used to transfer large amounts of data locally for shared
Excel files, scans, and shared Hardware resourses. WAN wise we access the
internet, send large e-mail, VPN into our customers site for dispatching
purposes and often remote from the field back to the office to access
information on our lan. The issue is that one of our customers changed our
VPN access to a location that has the split tunneling turned off and another
only allows VPN access thru a pre configured cisco 905 router. My thought is
to install two nics in each computer, run two modems and two seperate routers
and use one for the lan with internet access and one for the WAN. I am really
not sure if this is the solution or if it will even work. I know that I can
change the subnet of one card but i'm not sure how to access the internet
with the lan if i'm using my tcpip for the WAN? I hope i'm not so confused
that I sound stupid but any input or direction would be appreciated. The
customer that removed the split tunneling may give me the option of a site to
site VPN access but I would than have to figure out how to set up a corporate
VPN for sites to access that would than access their site.
 
Tomkat743 said:
What community or support option would best help me reconfigure my companies
network. I have 7 offices in various locations with about 10 PC's per
location. At each location I have a typical network with a cable modem or
other high speed service, a wireless router, and usually a switch or hub to
add the additional PC's. In the past this has worked with little or no
problems, save for the occasional downed device or virus. We are a high
speed internet installation company so I typically have someone in each
office who has enough savvy to troubleshoot and fix these type of issues.
Our network is used to transfer large amounts of data locally for shared
Excel files, scans, and shared Hardware resourses. WAN wise we access the
internet, send large e-mail, VPN into our customers site for dispatching
purposes and often remote from the field back to the office to access
information on our lan. The issue is that one of our customers changed our
VPN access to a location that has the split tunneling turned off and another
only allows VPN access thru a pre configured cisco 905 router. My thought is
to install two nics in each computer, run two modems and two seperate routers
and use one for the lan with internet access and one for the WAN. I am really
not sure if this is the solution or if it will even work. I know that I can
change the subnet of one card but i'm not sure how to access the internet
with the lan if i'm using my tcpip for the WAN? I hope i'm not so confused
that I sound stupid but any input or direction would be appreciated. The
customer that removed the split tunneling may give me the option of a site to
site VPN access but I would than have to figure out how to set up a corporate
VPN for sites to access that would than access their site.
Click to expand...

If you have 7 offices with around 70 PCs in total, with VPNs
and various other advanced facilities then you should engage
the services of a suitably qualified systems administrator.
Trying to get free help in a newsgroup is unlikely to give you
a robust and dependable installation. Newsgroups are great
for giving advice for specific problems and perhaps a few
pointers. You appear to be looking for someone who will
design your system for you, free of charge.
 
I should have been more specific about quantity and location so as not to
lead anyone to wrong conclusions. We are a small company with limited
financial resources and I do the best I can to keep up with the technology
while struggling to maintain day to day operations. My corporate office has
8 total hardwired computers and gets accessed daily by two or three laptops.
1 computer is for our bookkeeper one for her assistant. One for our Project
Administrator and one for the projects billing clerk. 3 machines are for
dispatching and one more for the small warehouse to track inventory. Our
owner, operations manager, and local project manager use their laptops. My
position is to setup, fix, train, manage, inspect, invent, implement,
coordinate, purchace, sell, direct, hire, fire, consult and clean up the
mess. Forgive me for not sending out my resume prior to asking for help. The
setup that I have here is simple and can be maintained by any one over the
phone. I have an Office Depot purchased Linksys Router connected by a full T1
and two switches one Gigabit one 10/100. The gigabit switch feeds the
corporate side and the other one feeds the computers on the project side. I
have no remote access open and instead of WEP or WPA encryption I tell the
router not to broadcast the ssid and have a hidden mapped network drive
between my bookkeeper and her assistant to share quickbooks thru the gigabit
switch. The other machines on the project side share one file using Excel's
file sharing capabilities so they can all make changes at the same time. The
three dispatch machines run dual monitors so they can open up the Excel
dispatch log on one screen and our customers in-house proprietary software on
the other screen. We use Cisco's VPN software that came to us via a disk from
our customer with all settings predetermined to access their site. I have
TCP-IP set up for the Internet access and IPX-SPX set up for the LAN. Now
I'm no genius but this config has been working at this site for three years
with 0 maintenance save for the upgrade to the gigabit switch which I bought
along with two cards just to see how it would perform since our quickbooks
file is getting so large. It didn't seem to make much of a difference. Now
after all this time my customer throws me a curve ball and changes the way
their contractors can log into their VPN which affects this project and one
other one that is set up similarly and for the same customer. And I ask for a
little help on where to get some support or give me a suggestion as to what I
might try and your advice is to stop trying to get free help and hire
someone. (LIKE WHO? YOU?) I would rather try to learn as I go so as we
expand I can get things set up the same way. Instead of having remote sharing
or a VPN into our offices I utilize File sharing on Groove Networks another
fine microsoft product that I guess I shouldn't be asking questions about.
This person I should hire, should he be full time and should I pay for him to
fly to each and every location so he can evaluate my systems and make
suggestions as to advanced security measures and software purchasing. Maybe
you could talk to my customers and get them to give their contractors a 20
percent or so increase in rates so as they can afford these services. Thanks
alot for all your assistance and I hope you have a good night.
 
Tomkat743 said:
I should have been more specific about quantity and location so as not
to lead anyone to wrong conclusions. We are a small company with
limited financial resources and I do the best I can to keep up with
the technology
Click to expand...

(snip very long explanation)

Tomkat, I am extremely sympathetic to your situation since my clients
are home users and small businesses just like you. Although you had a
bad reaction to what Pegasus told you, he was right.

This is a cost of doing business. If your business cannot afford
$500-1,000 (and the cost could certainly be less) to consult someone
who will set your business network up correctly, then you have more
problems than just networking.

I am not saying this to hurt your feelings in any way. But the kind of
help you need requires someone to go on-site. There is no way you could
get accurate and precise help for this situation without a skilled
professional being hands-on.

Malke
 
Thank you, my original question was where do i go for support and resources
not who will do this for free. I would be more than happy to pay consulting
fees or any reasonable amount to have someone take a look or give one on one
realtime advice. What I was not interested in was someone who made a
conclusion without investigating or understanding what I was asking. I do not
wish to hire someone full time to do something I feel I can learn with some
direction. I also do not know if I need to get someone local to just one
office or if It would work like I said with real time one on one consulting.
Any advice on the type of individule and what I can expect him to charge
would be appreciated.
 
Tomkat743 said:
Thank you, my original question was where do i go for support and
resources not who will do this for free. I would be more than happy to
pay consulting fees or any reasonable amount to have someone take a
look or give one on one realtime advice. What I was not interested in
was someone who made a conclusion without investigating or
understanding what I was asking. I do not wish to hire someone full
time to do something I feel I can learn with some direction. I also do
not know if I need to get someone local to just one office or if It
would work like I said with real time one on one consulting. Any
advice on the type of individule and what I can expect him to charge
would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

I would look in your local equivalent of the Yellow Pages (telephone
directory for businesses if you aren't in the US) for networking
consultants. It would also be useful to ask friends or colleagues for
the names of people they recommend.

There is no reason to hire someone full-time to set you up, and in fact
most small businesses can't do this. Most small businesses will hire
someone like me - outside tech support - to come and set them up and
tell them what has been done and how to take care of it. Some
businesses will then have the tech come in on a regular or as-needed
basis.

A competent tech should give you all the information about the setup
after s/he is finished. For instance, when I do a job like yours the
client gets a 3-ring binder with all pertinent information, passwords,
etc. in it when I'm done. You should expect to receive something like
this.

Malke
 
Tomkat743 said:
Thank you, my original question was where do i go for support and resources
not who will do this for free. I would be more than happy to pay consulting
fees or any reasonable amount to have someone take a look or give one on one
realtime advice. What I was not interested in was someone who made a
conclusion without investigating or understanding what I was asking. I do not
wish to hire someone full time to do something I feel I can learn with some
direction. I also do not know if I need to get someone local to just one
office or if It would work like I said with real time one on one consulting.
Any advice on the type of individule and what I can expect him to charge
would be appreciated.

"Malke" wrote:
Click to expand...

I consider "word of mouth" to be the most successful approach for
getting high quality and affordable IT support. Look around and
see who owns between half a dozen and 50 PCs (e.g. your
accountant, or a local small business, a business contact), then ask
them for their details of their IT support arrangements.

Here are some of the criteria I would apply when selecting
an IT support person:
- Track record (ask for current references and check them out!).
- Availability, response time.
- Charge rates inside and outside normal working hours.
- Expertise & experience in your particular area of interest.
- Documentation (ask for recent samples!).
- Ability to support your various sites remotely (this saves
you heaps of money!).
- Professional approach.

About the last point: You might, for example, ask them to
outline their plan of attack for installing a major service
pack on your server, pointing out that downtime must be
kept to a minimum. A solid zero risk answer would be:
1. Create a full backup or image of the server.
2. Test this image, using a separate disk.
3. Install the service pack.
4. If things go wrong, roll the server back, using the
previously made image.

Many administrators will do Step 3 only ("It's a Microsoft
issued service pack, they have tested it extensively, surely
it will be a breeze!"). Some will do Step 1 as well but too
many of them omit Step 2. We sometimes see their
desperate cries for help in these newsgroups.
 
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