Associate
- Joined
- 22 Apr 2006
- Posts
- 313
First of all let me apologise in advance, I'm a near complete novice when it comes to server issues so some of my questions may display a lack of elementary knowledge. Also this entire post may actually belong in the Windows software section so sorry for that as well 
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Anyway, I'm currently lending a hand in building new servers for a small family business.
The current setup it pretty basic, It's just a single PC running windows XP Home with two hard drives in raid. All the others computers put the files they want to share or backup on there, and the printers are accessed through there as well (I think). It's not very sophisticated but It's important to note that there is no one who is very tech literate when it comes to PCs and servers in this business, and this simple setup has worked nicely for 6 years
Now the company is now opening another office in another city and the server system needs a bit of an upgrade to accommodate this, which includes building another similar server to put in the new office and also upgrading the current server. I have two basic queries.
1) Will Windows Server Edition do the trick? I've never worked with any server editions before but I like the look of WHS 2011 as a cheap alternative to getting a full license of Windows 7 Pro which is what would have happened. Will a copy of WHS 2011 put on a server machine allow easy connection and file sharing between the PCs in the office, kind of like a stripped down version of full Windows 7.
2) The second problem is sharing files between these two offices. A brief look into VPNs and we thought they were probably a bit to complex for us to setup and we can't afford someone to do it for us so we've bought some Cloud server space from Rackspace.
I think what we're planning is using a piece of software like Cloudberry to sync both servers in both offices with the online cloud server so both offices can have access the the files on each server.
Will this basic idea work? As I don't know an awful lot about the subject, I just want to make sure the basic plan is workable before new parts and software is bought.
Thanks a lot for any help or advice that you can give and sorry if my questions are a bit vague.
Steve
.Anyway, I'm currently lending a hand in building new servers for a small family business.
The current setup it pretty basic, It's just a single PC running windows XP Home with two hard drives in raid. All the others computers put the files they want to share or backup on there, and the printers are accessed through there as well (I think). It's not very sophisticated but It's important to note that there is no one who is very tech literate when it comes to PCs and servers in this business, and this simple setup has worked nicely for 6 years
Now the company is now opening another office in another city and the server system needs a bit of an upgrade to accommodate this, which includes building another similar server to put in the new office and also upgrading the current server. I have two basic queries.
1) Will Windows Server Edition do the trick? I've never worked with any server editions before but I like the look of WHS 2011 as a cheap alternative to getting a full license of Windows 7 Pro which is what would have happened. Will a copy of WHS 2011 put on a server machine allow easy connection and file sharing between the PCs in the office, kind of like a stripped down version of full Windows 7.
2) The second problem is sharing files between these two offices. A brief look into VPNs and we thought they were probably a bit to complex for us to setup and we can't afford someone to do it for us so we've bought some Cloud server space from Rackspace.
I think what we're planning is using a piece of software like Cloudberry to sync both servers in both offices with the online cloud server so both offices can have access the the files on each server.
Will this basic idea work? As I don't know an awful lot about the subject, I just want to make sure the basic plan is workable before new parts and software is bought.
Thanks a lot for any help or advice that you can give and sorry if my questions are a bit vague.
Steve