Linking two offices together

Ev0

Ev0

Ev0

Soldato
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18 Oct 2002
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ok I'll keep this short and sweet :)

Parents have an office, they are soon to open another a few miles away, how can they have things so that the new office can connect to their domain and file/mail server in their current location?

Current office runs an SBS 2003 domain with an ADSL link, 2 people in the new office, they will access email and word docs.
 
you've got 2 options

1) put ADSL links at both sites, and create a VPN between the two. Basically just a device that will need to plug into the router at both ends. Look up VPN appliances

2) buy a proper line from BT to link the two together. If the link goes down, they might actually care. We had customers on consumer broadband, and getting BT to give a damn was very hard. Usually took weeks to get them to anything. not ideal if you need it to do business. If you're interested Suggest you give BT corporat services a ring and they can talk you through the otions and pricing

if its only for them to read e-mail and browse t'internet. number 1 will be cheaper,and you can run software VPN on a dedicated PC at other site, and VPN software on Windows Server 2000/2003
 
MrLOL said:
you've got 2 options

1) put ADSL links at both sites, and create a VPN between the two. Basically just a device that will need to plug into the router at both ends. Look up VPN appliances

2) buy a proper line from BT to link the two together. If the link goes down, they might actually care. We had customers on consumer broadband, and getting BT to give a damn was very hard. Usually took weeks to get them to anything. not ideal if you need it to do business. If you're interested Suggest you give BT corporat services a ring and they can talk you through the otions and pricing

if its only for them to read e-mail and browse t'internet. number 1 will be cheaper,and you can run software VPN on a dedicated PC at other site, and VPN software on Windows Server 2000/2003
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Pretty much what I was thinking, their budget for this is smaller than my bank balance, they really do loathe spending anything on IT as they see it as no benefit lol.

To a point they are right, it's not mission critical, would just make things a whole lot easier.

Leased lines etc I think are well out due to price, am waiting on some quotes for some kind of managed VPN solution but I reckon they will be too much as well.

I think I'd be happier with some kind of hardware vpn setup which I know will cost more but I just think it'll be easier for them in the long run, easier to maintain from my part anyway :)

This is for a very very small business, I'm wondering if something like these SSL VPNs would do the job for them.
 
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SBS2003 has a thing called Remote Web Workplace IIRC - it a bit like a Citrix NFuse page that can give you access to different things on the network.

I haven't played with SBS in a few years and even then, didn't bother much with it Remote Worker stuff but at least the Outlook Web Access is nice.

Depending on how secure you set things up with SSL etc, you may be able to ditch the VPN and just login through the web portal.
 
Just setting something similar with Offices in Exeter and Kingsbridge for a customer.

Get a couple of Draytek 2800's and create the VPN link with them. If your SBS box has a couple of NIC's installed it does make it a little more complicated but you'll find creating the link with routers is a lot more reliable.

You will find domain logons will be slow in the remote office unless you put in an additional Win2k3 domain controller in, but you probably won't want to do that unless you've got 5 or more client pcs in the remote office.

If you fancy having a go yourself then have a look at www.smallbizserver.net.
 
Would the ADSL upload speed work for the file sharing ie how big are the files?

All data retrieved at the site from the server would be retrieved at the ADSL upload link speed ie 640k or thereabouts.

You could consider file space on a secure server for files with a hosting company if you need better file perfromance.
 
errata said:
Would the ADSL upload speed work for the file sharing ie how big are the files?

All data retrieved at the site from the server would be retrieved at the ADSL upload link speed ie 640k or thereabouts.

You could consider file space on a secure server for files with a hosting company if you need better file perfromance.
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Or a small TS server at the main office.
 
Jimathy said:
Just setting something similar with Offices in Exeter and Kingsbridge for a customer.

Get a couple of Draytek 2800's and create the VPN link with them. If your SBS box has a couple of NIC's installed it does make it a little more complicated but you'll find creating the link with routers is a lot more reliable.

You will find domain logons will be slow in the remote office unless you put in an additional Win2k3 domain controller in, but you probably won't want to do that unless you've got 5 or more client pcs in the remote office.

If you fancy having a go yourself then have a look at www.smallbizserver.net.
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SBS box has 1 nic, only 1 or maybe 2 client pcs in the remote office. The problem is I'm trying to avoid having to put a server box in the new office yet I still need to have their pcs on the domain so they can be managed.
 
I look after the IT for a school that's on two sites, each with a 2Mbs ADSL line. There's a VPN link between the routers (Draytek 2600s) and this seems to do what they need if a little slow at times. There's a server on a separate domain at each site but users can log on to either domain, whichever site they're at.
 
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Ev0 said:
SBS box has 1 nic, only 1 or maybe 2 client pcs in the remote office. The problem is I'm trying to avoid having to put a server box in the new office yet I still need to have their pcs on the domain so they can be managed.
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Definately go with a couple of Drayteks doing the VPN. Take the two computers that are going to be at the remote site to the main office and run the connect computer wizards, take them back to the remote site, setup VPN, and add your SBS Server as the first DNS Server and your Draytek Router as the second DNS Server in the Local Area Connection TCP/IP properties on each PC and you'll be good to go. The speed over ADSL will be fine for Exchange and Outlook, file sharing will be fine for smaller files, especially if you can get them to spend out on an and ADSL line with 800kbps up.

I'm doing a similar setup (albeit a big bigger) for a Structural Engineer at the moment, we're putting in an additional Win2K3 Server in each office using DFSv2 for mirroring large files between the offices, hosting the SBS box as a Virtual Machine in a London data centre and linking it all together with Draytek 2950's. The Local Win2K3 Server machines are VMware Virtual Machines floated between a couple of Linux host machines using drdb and heartbeat for high availability so an entire server can fail in a big way and it all keeps going. Lots of fun!
 
Jimathy - your approach sounds interesting from a technical perspective.

I understand what you're up to with each component but would you care to elaborate some details on the Linux/DRDB/Heartbeat end? I'm not so hot on Open Souce solution to these problems - i the past I've used Marathon FT for high availability but its seriously expensive - your approach sounds very nice.

PM me if you don't mind elaborating.
 
sidethink said:
Jimathy - your approach sounds interesting from a technical perspective.

I understand what you're up to with each component but would you care to elaborate some details on the Linux/DRDB/Heartbeat end? I'm not so hot on Open Souce solution to these problems - i the past I've used Marathon FT for high availability but its seriously expensive - your approach sounds very nice.

PM me if you don't mind elaborating.
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Essentially we start off with two servers each with ubuntu installed, the data partition is created/formatted as a DRDB block device on each server, those partitions are a mirror of each other. Heartbeat is the monitor so if server 1 fails heartbeat will mount the block device on server 2 and then start any services which is configured to monitior, in our case VMware, but it could be samba, apache etc. The data link between the servers can be over either a serial or network, we chose to go with a second NIC for the heartbeat monitor and data sync so as to not clog up normal network traffic.

We could have done all this with just windows but that would have meant at least 2 extra licenses at well over £500 a pop.
 
is DFS relaible now? Used it a few times in Win2k and for no reason it would delete the copy on one server and copy all the data back :eek:

On a gigabit network it was frustraiting but normaly happened out of hours, on adsl it would be unworkable
 
DFS has changed considerably since Win2K and now with Win2K3 R2 even more so.

It will only send those parts of the file that have changed rather than the whole file. If a new file is created it will try and construct the new file on the remote server using files that are local rather than send the new file over the VPN.

On paper it looks the way to go for my situation but we'll see ;)
 
Jimathy said:
DFS has changed considerably since Win2K and now with Win2K3 R2 even more so.

It will only send those parts of the file that have changed rather than the whole file. If a new file is created it will try and construct the new file on the remote server using files that are local rather than send the new file over the VPN.

On paper it looks the way to go for my situation but we'll see ;)
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Sounds good. DRDB and heatbeat seem excellent in theory will have to look into them furthur. Could save me a packet on our next server deployment (11 servers for ERP system)
 
Jimathy said:
Definately go with a couple of Drayteks doing the VPN. Take the two computers that are going to be at the remote site to the main office and run the connect computer wizards, take them back to the remote site, setup VPN, and add your SBS Server as the first DNS Server and your Draytek Router as the second DNS Server in the Local Area Connection TCP/IP properties on each PC and you'll be good to go. The speed over ADSL will be fine for Exchange and Outlook, file sharing will be fine for smaller files, especially if you can get them to spend out on an and ADSL line with 800kbps up.
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after everything you've said

this is how id do it. I assumed software would be best if you superiors are very tight, if they're willing to let you spend a couple of hundread quid then Drayteks and ADSL lines are the best and most cost efficient way to go.
 
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