Redoing cluttered server room

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

Ok,

 

I still have some more researching to do in regards to ip addresses and the sort and knowing what these machines are doing.

 

and another question... I have a computer that is not in our office, it is in our storage room which is in the same building and on the same floor. We do not have it connected to the server and it does not have a wireless pci card to allow it to try and connect to our network; however, I am not sure if it is going to be sucesseful to setup a wireless relay from the storage room to our office. (we use the storage room for some inventory and for shipping purposes)

 

I am thinking that with the elevators and all of the walls that the signal would have to go through, that I do not think we will be able to achieve this. Although a mobile drive could be one solution, i fear that the cost out weight the solution. I even thought that perhaps it might just have to be wired and hiring a company to run the wires from our router to the computer in the storage room. again any thoughts?

If you are in australia i could contract this for you.

Else cost will be far from prohibitive to do this.

Is there any reason you can't do it?

[Nytekrawlerr]

Thx shibby; however, i am located in the US. as for your question about why I just do not do it, i am not sure at this moment the policy the building we are in have regarding non building management personal throwing wiring through the ceiling, I have to find out what we can do and what will be the most cost efficent and effective route.

 

I want to know if it will be easier just hiring someone to run the wires, or if a wireless router will do the job, i am just concerned regarding the connect from our office to the storage room how the storage room will not receive the proper singals.

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

Thx shibby; however, i am located in the US. as for your question about why I just do not do it, i am not sure at this moment the policy the building we are in have regarding non building management personal throwing wiring through the ceiling, I have to find out what we can do and what will be the most cost efficent and effective route.

 

I want to know if it will be easier just hiring someone to run the wires, or if a wireless router will do the job, i am just concerned regarding the connect from our office to the storage room how the storage room will not receive the proper singals.

You will want a fixed line.

End of story...

I can't let myself not say anything regarding that and feel like a good Samaritan afterwards.

*anything below this point, in this post is just speculation*

You might get away with the Wireless, but its just not worth the risk...

Especially if you are transferring sensitive data, which by the sounds of it (with the encryption and data security you speak of) you wont want a wireless connection...

Packet sniffers can do nasty things .

Oh, please take into consideration when reading this post, that it is monday morning, it was 41 Degrees Centigrade (approx 106F i think) yesterday and I decided it was a good idea to start drinking at lunch time...

So my head is sore and i can't be stuffed to proof read

[itsernst]

You can run your own cable in the office, there should not be any rules prohibiting that. You can buy a spool of CAT-5 or CAT-6 that are usually 1000ft. They are not too expensive and it will be much MUCH MUCH more reliable than going wireless. In addition to wireless, you would need repeaters setup everywhere to re-broadcast your signal around the office. If one of them has an issue it becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

You can run your own cable in the office, there should not be any rules prohibiting that. You can buy a spool of CAT-5 or CAT-6 that are usually 1000ft. They are not too expensive and it will be much MUCH MUCH more reliable than going wireless. In addition to wireless, you would need repeaters setup everywhere to re-broadcast your signal around the office. If one of them has an issue it becomes a bigger and bigger issue.

What he said!

[Nytekrawlerr]

I might have miscommunicated myself. We have an office suite in a building that is not ours, we also have a secondary smaller suite that we hace convertered into a storage unit which is where the remote desktop sits. I do have to get premission from the management company that maintains the building, within the confines of our office that would not be the case; however, since the second office suite is not directly connected, we would have to hire a technician who is state cert. and insured and get approved by the management company so that the wire could be run across.

 

I want to see about setting up wireless; but, I fear that there will be to much singal clouding because of what is located between our main office and the second office (storage unit).

 

I might even tell him that we should scrap the idea all together; however, he wants to install a security camera to monitor the storage room.

 

Thank

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

I still don't understand why you wouldn't be able to run the cable yourself, but I'm not in your locale, and dont know its rules.

Still better off to have a hardline between the two, even if you have to pay a contractor to do it...

Get in contact with the management company and see if they have somebody that regularly looks after the place...

What if you ran Fibre? Then you wouldn't be making a connection from one end to the other??

 

*bad advice below here, but its still facts. I'm sticking to my guns and saying you NEED a hardline*

 

You could get away with wireless using directional antennae on each ap, but its NOT WORTH THE TIME/RISK

[Nytekrawlerr]

I wanted to know, if there are any good books out there, that might be a good read on this subject? I have been looking and there is one called "Mastering Windows 2003 Server" and another called "Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2003" are either of these books good for what I need as far as understanding and being able to get my self up to date on some techniques?

 

Thanks in advance, as always.

 

Shibby -

 

unfortnately the building management company is very hard on its rules, since we would be going over other offices and around the elevator shaft, they want us to hire a professional. If it were up to me, I would do it myself, but there are rules that are enforced by the building and there is no way for us to go around them.

 

i agree a hardwire would be the best bet; however, there could be chance in the near future were we might actually be moving as we seem to be outgrowing the office.

 

I am thinking we might either scrap the idea altogether.

Edited November 25, 2009 by Nytekrawlerr

[shibby_geek_guy_69]

I wanted to know, if there are any good books out there, that might be a good read on this subject? I have been looking and there is one called "Mastering Windows 2003 Server" and another called "Mastering Microsoft Exchange Server 2003" are either of these books good for what I need as far as understanding and being able to get my self up to date on some techniques?

I've found books useless.

But then again, I also failed at school, never went to University/college blah blah blah.

I'm a hands on guy.

What do you want to do?

Dare say your requirements wont be all that elaborate, and solutions for your problems will be more/less off the shelf anyway...

[Nytekrawlerr]

So,

 

I purchased a Thecus N4100Pro for the server room and 4 Seagate 1TB 7200 RPM HDDs, to setup my backing up needs to a raid 10 configuration, unless anyone has any other suggestions.

 

One question, if i want to open up a file that has been backup will it open up without needing to be extracted? i.e. does this device or will any NAS just save automatically or can it be configured in the manner it saves, so as to allow for users to pull/look for files they are needing?

 

Thanks

 

Also, I am having a Tech Specialist coming to do a quick rundown of my server room and to list suggestions/improvements.

 

Talk to yall later.

[Nytekrawlerr]

I have a new question - hopefully it will not stray from the original topic - but anyways:

 

Here is the new task handed down to me by my boss. We have a Doctor in Philly doing clinical research for our product, my boss wants to buy a computer (dell) and he wants me to setup such that the computer in Philly will save periodically and then send it over to the computer in our office in florida. So that we can monitor the Doctor's work. - and before anyone say anything the Doctor knows that we will be setting up for this to happen as the machine he uses is our property.

 

So basically doctor write/saves work on his computer in Philly, we want to be able to see this through our computer in florida.

 

my theory on this, is for me to have his connected to our network than have his system setup to backup files to the same computer that we will be using to monitor the progress.

 

your thoughts or perhaps if someone can lead me in the right direction so i can set this up, i would gladly like this.

 

Also, the boss wants the machine we buy to have Win7 with backwards compatibility to WinXP.

 

Thank.

[Nemo]

So,

 

I purchased a Thecus N4100Pro for the server room and 4 Seagate 1TB 7200 RPM HDDs, to setup my backing up needs to a raid 10 configuration, unless anyone has any other suggestions.

 

One question, if i want to open up a file that has been backup will it open up without needing to be extracted? i.e. does this device or will any NAS just save automatically or can it be configured in the manner it saves, so as to allow for users to pull/look for files they are needing?

 

Thanks

 

Also, I am having a Tech Specialist coming to do a quick rundown of my server room and to list suggestions/improvements.

 

Talk to yall later.

The Thecus N4100PRO seems to be a fairly good unit for the price with most of the options found on more expensive units. If you haven't done so already, make sure you update the unit to use the latest firmware before you start using it to store data.

 

If it were me, I would go with a RAID 5 array in place of the RAID 10, the performance difference just isn't going to be that great and you'll end up with more disk space in the RAID 5 array. I'm in the middle of running performance tests on the Thecus N4100PRO but I haven't done the RAID 10 array yet - maybe I'll do that next to seeif it's significantly better than the RAID 5 array.

 

As to your question regarding opening up a backup file - it all depends on how you backed it up. If it was a straight copy, then yes you can open it w/o extracting it. It you used any sort of compression or encryption, then yes you will decrypt/expand it before it can be accessed.