Advice on LAN design and equipment needed please.

FutureProof

If I was to set up a network with some form of storage that would be accessible to all machines on the network, what equipment would I need and how should it be designed?
It would consist of between 5 and 40 computers, some of which would only be there temporarily and there here would have to be an internet connection. All advice appreciated thanks.

Capt'n Midnight

Who to administer the network ?

Are you running windows machines or others.

Internet connection - you would need a firewall for this

Do you have a budget ?

Do you need users to logon to machines , what sort of secuity do you need ?

How long is a piece of string ?

How much file storage space do you need ?

Is this commercial or for a school ?

What do you want to run on the PC's

you need switches and cabling regardless, one 48 port one or two 24's at a minimun, get gigabit unless strapped for cash - the switches can be together or at opposite ends of the network

http://www.connectix.ie are resonable for cables, if you can't terminate you can still buy 20m patch leads, and if really stuck you could buy a coupler to join two together

at one extreme you could setup one beefy machine with educational ubuntu on it and have the rest boot up across the network, all data would then be on the good machine, the others would not need any drives. no floppies, no CD's no hard drives. mimimal cost for hardware, none for software

at the other you could go with a microsoft solution, a pair of Servers for logons, another for data , another for internet proxy, you then have to buy client access licenses, - the licenses will cost as much as entry level hardware if you also buy micosoft office.

AutoCAD runs at about three grand a license, other packages have a similar price, if you need expensive softeware then you should probably spend as much again on the hardware to get the full use out of it.

FutureProof

I realise I am being a bit vague but I just want to get an idea of what I need.


I would have to administer the network myself (I'm a bit of a novice with networks, but I have to learn some time ) .

All the machines running windows.

There would be a budget in the region of a few thousand euro for the network alone (that is not including the user's computers).

Security is not an issue as all users would be completely trustworthy, there would be no sensitive information on the network, and logons would be unneccessary.

I would like to have at least 500GB of network storage. Would a NAS do the job or would I need a machine just for this?

The machines would be used for standard web browsing and not much else.

It is for a business.

No software is necessary.

Would an ordinary home router be capable of handling the reasonably large amounts of traffic or would I need a more expensive model? Also would the firewall built in the router be enough?

And thanks for the help Capt'n!

Capt'n Midnight

You can get hard drives of 500GB so a pair of them mirrored would do, RAID 1
Drives get bigger every year so you can upgrade. If you had tonnes of money you could do a SCSI RAID 5 with hot swap.

Backups ?
Tape drives are expensive, and you are still in range of external USB HDD, fireproof safes and off site storage are also to be considered.

If you don't need logons then you don't really need overkill on the server side. Depending on what they need to store you could use a web server / ftp.

A home router would handle the traffic on an ADSL line. If you want more bandwidth the price of it would easily cover a better box, probably supplied as part of the contract. You would need to see how much bandwidth you will use.

Do you know how much bandwidth you need ?
A caching proxy might help cut down on this if most users will be doing similar stuff.

preilly79

you could pay just a couple of hundred euro for somebody to do a site survey and consultation. you've given some reasonable information but there's always going to be something overlooked. you also have the insurance policy if something should go wrong in the future.

_CreeD_

I think maybe you need to rethink some key points of your approach. If this is for a business then 'trustworthy' moves from being an infrastructure deciding fact to 'well thats nice but we still need accountability' territory. I've lived in the states now for nearly 5 years so sorry for the ignorance but considering that most businesses here have to reach certain levels of information security standards to do just about anything (SOX, HIPAA, PCI etc.) there may be something similar governing your area of business. Maybe not but if someone, no matter how trustworthy you think they are, starts downloading dodgy material and you can't trace it you can end up paddleless up that stinky wee creek. Implementing simple security is not that hard and certainly doesn't have to be an imposition on your users. Basically take another look at your policy (yep even if it's just an idea think of it as the basis of your policy) and then think how hard would it be for it to be abused and what would be the consequences, if you still want everything open fair enough.

On the hardware the suggestions above are good. I'd add that you should get Managed switches (they have management interfaces, usually web interfaces these days) the advantage being that you can remotely access them and do some troubleshooting - if it's a very small business area this might not be of concern but if someone calls saying the network has gone down at 2am it's kinda nice to be able to VPN in, check the switch and tell the user to try turning their PC ON since the switch is actually fine...
Invest in a small Cisco firewall (A PIX 501 or ASA 5505, the 501 is cheaper and will do fine). No, don't run away screaming, the beauty of a PIX is that unless you want to start getting into setting up VPNs or heavily manipulating traffic there is very little you have to do to get it working. simply plug it in, set it for DHCP on the outside and to give DHCP on the inside (about 7 lines of text easily found on the web). Done, enterprise class firewalling for all your clients that will eventually let you setup a nice VPN for yourself and those remote calls. Your other option is to rely on the broadband router (usually not a good choice as most are not stateful and require manual tuning of ports to achieve max. security) and/or installing software firewalls on the clients - which besides taking longer to configure is much harder to maintain. Trust me the PIX is easier.
For your storage NAS is the way to go, get one with an iSCSI interface as it just uses plain old ethernet (the same as your PCs), and definitely get a Gigabit capable unit (and switch that it's connected to). More money usually equates to more features like on the fly backups, ad integration etc.