Bandwidth Place 2

The company I work for has a really, really crappy computer system from the ground up.

The desktops are on average over eight years old. Most are running windows xp and have between 512 and 768 MB of ram. There is no backup system of any kind, no organization of the files in any way.

The network is basically one big workgroup where all the computers have a shared folder and all of the company data resides in the shared folders. No method of data backup at all. No security at all.

At one point in the loop they have a wireless router which broadcasts the company name as it's SSID and has no form of wireless encryption/security.

I know they need new computers, that part I really don't have any questions about.

The thing I'm debating is that: Should I just "improve" their peer to peer style network or setup a client-server network.

The client server network comes with a few issues:

I've never used windows sever before.

I don't know how well the different versions of windows here will play with windows server.

They have a big printer plotter which prints out huge sheets for construction drawings and right now it is installed and connected to one of the computers in the peer to peer network. The other computers just install it as a network computer through the wizard... no disk or other drivers necessary.

I'm not sure I'd be able to (or even have to) install it on the server running windows server.

I'm not sure what version of server to use (2008 or 2012).


Now if I choose just to fix what they have then the first thing would be a backup system. I'm thinking raid array plus a physical backup every week would be then be removed from the system. The raid array would be implemented in a file server. That file server would have 4 1TB hard drives in it. I could use a program like SyncBack to schedule daily backups to the file server that way there would also be local copies on the individual computers and backups on the file server. Then there would be the raid array used in the file server for added performance/data protection.

To fix the security issues I would turn WPA on the router and make it so that it doesn't broadcast the SSID.

What do you think?

Also if I do learn/go client server with windows server can I install say programs like microsoft office and autodesk autocad onto the server itself and then have a system where each user "logs in" and uses the programs on the server?

If so can I give them their own "storage space" on the server?

Company you work for = you got a job! Congrats!

While I have to kind of work with Windows Server 2008 at work, we don't use that server for company share stuff. For us that OS is just for serving up a .NET-based website.

Priority #1 I'd say is yes enable WPA/WPA2 on their wifi and optionally hide the SSID. BUT, look out, WPA is a standard that came out in 2003. If the computers are as old as you say they are, they might actually be too old to support WPA. Nothing a new set of wifi cards can't fix, though.

One way for everyone to just run programs that are actually running on the server is to let them all do Remote Desktop to the server. Each of them will have to have an account on the server, speaking of which... Active Directory and stuffs and stuffs. I haven't personally played with it but I know AD is integral to all of this.
As for a commercial product that can help you do a lot of this stuff:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpdUDUVMNKM
It's pretty damn cool, and I went with coworkers to a Citrix presentation for that product and afterward we got a free showing of The Dark Knight Rises (that's how they got us professionals to attend). That was the day before the official opening of the movie, super awesome .

I don't know how serious you want to get regarding stuff like hardware choices; will the server be an actual rackmount? Will it have battery backup? Redundant power supplies? I also strongly suggest that the RAID be run on a separate system than the one running the Windows Server that everyone will be accessing.

So much to think about.

P.S. I consider this a job for an IT guy. It is almost completely unrelated to computer science and software engineering and they were definitely separate majors in college. We didn't take any of the same (major-relevant) classes and the IT guy at my work knows no programming but knows wayyyy more about this stuff than I do.

The funny thing about it is that I'm a safety inspector for a company that produces and installs concrete planks. My job title really has nothing to do with computers in any way and is completely unrelated to my education. On top of all that my education was in Computer Science/Software Engineering and I have no formal safety training at all.

But the offer presented itself and with no income I couldn't say no.

No one at this company has a clue about a computer except for the few tasks they've learned to do on them like office type work and CAD drafting.

It's up to me to fix/oversee everything like that here. I don't HAVE to do it but it makes me that much more valuable and it can potentially earn me a few dollars more per hour while I do look for a better job.

As far as reduant power supplies, rack mount hardware and uninterruptable power supplies I don't think that will be necessary.

I was thinking really just building a decent machine and putting a bunch of ram and hard drives in it. Set it up so that instead of having shared folders all over the place they would keep all the files locally and I would set up an application that backs up each computers files to the "server" at a set time probably daily. You would think of it as more of a "NAS" box then a server.

An uninterrupable power suppy probably wouldn't be necessary but can't hurt for the money.

As far as having everyone "log in" to one computer and use its program I really don't think that is an issue. The company would still need 3 liscenses of autocad for it to be legal so why bother cramming everyone onto one machine? It would prevent the scenario of the server dying and stopping everyone from working until I could get it fixed. Worst case scenario is that one person couldn't work until I got it fixed.

I was thinking of just having them buy like five new computers to start and getting rid of the five worst. Then I'd take the whats left of the old computers, format them and fresh install everything and make the necessary upgrades (i.e. computers with less then 2GB of ram) and reassiging them.

If all five of the computers are the same I can just configure one machine the way I want it and then clone the drive onto two backup drives. That way if a drive does die I can just plug another in and it's back up and running. The only thing that would really throw a wrench in the works there would be if two or more machines dies at the same time OR the motherboard/CPU died.

For these guys, who have zero as far as security/backup right now, even a little would go a long ways.

I keep rereading trying to think of a useful response, but your plan sounds good enough to me lol.

What specs you thinking? Are they really going to be open to spending on your upgrades?

Phenom 2 X4 965 BE
8GB RAM
and probably four 1TB hard drives (2 for storage and 2 for RAID backup)


These are the "features" I'd like to have:

I'd want some way to implement security to the point of saying for example that the accounting
department can't access the drafting departments stuff and vice versa.

So is there a way I could set it up so that the people storing the stuff on the server could
secure it from each another? Say like set up different "shared" folders but put different passwords
for each departments "folder". It would be like moving the peer to peer folders from each
individual computer to the server/file server. That way the data is protected by the RAID array
and as long as the file server is up anyone can get on and get what they need, reducing dependancy
on numerous physical machines.

What operating system is best for this? Windows 7, Windows Server 2008/2012, Linux ?


I do plan to build a few new machines to replace the worst ones, upgrade what can be upgraded as
some machines would be ok with just a full format, a reinstall, and some extra ram. Then reassign those
and get rid of the worst machines.


I think they are willing to spend some money, just not a ton. The quotes they have gotten are just sick... like between 15K and 20K USD. They do not need that kind of setup.

I think I could probably get them to spend between 3,000 and 5,000 total. So I should be able to do what I need to do without any major issues.

I'm thinking for a bunch of Windows PCs, the server should just be Windows as well.

To have department-specific shared folders you can use Groups:

http://i.imgur.com/70NHn.png

Just create a new group for each department. Then in the Users section you can add the respective group to that user's "Member Of" under Properties. They better all have password-protected accounts, btw.

Then in whatever shared folder you decide to make for each group, you just set so that only their group (and Administrator, probably a good idea lol) have read/write/etc access to the folder.

http://i.imgur.com/eLLhr.png

RAID backup is nice, I would also suggest some sort of snapshotting functionality, Shadow Copy comes to mind. This is so that there can be a history of different versions of files rather than a single backed up copy of something recent.

I was thinking of building a freeNAS box... I wasn't sure exactly which raid to choose or even how to set it up.

I think I remember reading you can set up raid within the freeNAS os?

I know they won't need a ton of backup data. I'm thinking of building a freeNAS box out of one of the existing computers.

I just ordered 6 new dells that are a pretty substantial upgrade to what they have here. They all feature a Sandy Bridge i3, 4GB of ram, 500GB hard drives... and so on.

So I was going to take a machine they already have, format it and install freeNAS. This way I can use an application like syncBack or Comodo backup to schedule incremential backups of specific folders on each desktop.

That way not every file on the whole machine needs back up. I can teach them to keep their important files in a single folder (that can have a subtree of other folders inside) that is scheduled for backup nightly.

The shadow copy looks really usefull as well. I'm going to read up on that.

I was also thinking, I saw a great deal on a 2TB mybook. I could also keep a backup on that, maybe run that backup every friday and keep it offline and offsite unless disaster strikes (or to perform the next system backup). It would essentially be used to backup the freeNAS box.

This way the computers would backup nightly to the freeNAS machine via SyncBack or Comodo and then I could backup the freeNAS to an external drive every friday.

Can I set up shadow copy on each client machine and then back that up to the freeNAS as well? Would each "version" require as much space as the original?

Would I be better off to ditch freeNAS and install windows 7 professional on the machine and just use the raid array plus external backup method?

RAID 5 and 6 (RAID Z and Z2 for ZFS) are probably the ones you should look at.
RAID 5: Permits loss of one drive. Capacity = (drive capacity) * ((number of drives) - 1)
RAID 6: Permits loss of two drives. Capacity = (drive capacity) * ((number of drives) - 2)

You can do all the setup in FreeNAS, but as I've posted before, I found that in order to get any respectable throughput I needed to upgrade the server to at least 3GHz Core 2 level performance. Even now I'm considering my options for additional single-threaded performance. I mainly blaim this performance issue on Samba being inefficient vs native Windows SMB.

Shadow Copy wiki page says it is block level, although I'm unsure of the actual implications compared to ZFS. ZFS snapshots (same type of feature) are also block level and I know work very efficiently because:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs#Copy-o ... onal_model (read "Snapshots and clones" section as well)

Yeah I know nothing about the Shadow Copy side of things.

My issue with Windows doing RAID is that options for software-based RAID are limited. Windows 7 isn't even allowed to do RAID 5 due to some licensing issue. On my desktop all I've been able to do is set up mirroring or stripe. You'd need a good hardware RAID card to handle it instead.

I know I'm pretty much leaning you toward FreeNAS and ZFS, but I should note that since I'm currently doing that setup, I'm having multitasking performance problems. Simply copying pictures from my camera's SD card at 20MB/s causes read performance from the server to be so bad that I can't even stream a movie at the same time. I don't know whats causing this issue and am sure I didn't have the issue while using FreeBSD (and setting everything up manually). Seeing as how FreeNAS is just FreeBSD, my woes are probably due to some configuration problems... somewhere.

Being that they only used basically two "shared" folders I think I'm going to put the server idea to bed.

I'm either going to set up a network attached storage via a mybook live or get one of those new netgear backup server/router combinations.

Most of the files are not "confidential" and the reason for the backup is mainly to prevent data loss. The stuff that is confidental to certain employees can be handled easily enough.

If necessary I can set up like password protected sharing but after thinking about it.. if there are only two folders that everyone works off of then there is no reason to do a complete company wide backup system.

Sure just a NAS, but at least still RAID/redundant the setup! :\