My wife works for a small health care agency that has six desktops, five of which are on a NT server. They have a part time Sys. Admin., whose service, I feel, leaves a lot to be desired. It took him two weeks to replace a bad hard drive. Today I went in to help her install a printer, she has been copying to a disk and walking into another office to print, and discovered all of the PC's are running Window 95, 32 Megs of RAM, and 400 Meg hard drives. Hardware wise, I know I can provide better maintance support than their current "Computer Guy", but I am just getting started in Networking. It took me about a month to set up a Samba ($15.00 RH 7.2) file sharing network with one 95 and two 98 clients. I would appreciate it if some one would recommend a step by step procedure for setting up and maintaining a small office network.
Thanks in Advance

Install redhat 7.3 with samba


As far as doing it step by step you must get redhat and samba installed. Then it's just a matter of having a good smb.conf file which this site has a lot of good examples.


You can maintain your system using up2date as long as there is internet access.

Demo accounts are free, you can add as many profiles as you want, but only entitle one at a time.

I recently subscribed to the Enterprise entitlement for my main system which includes auto update service. I also discovered that after doing this I now have basic entitlement for my other systems, which ain't bad.

This is only a suggestion, any distro will work just as well if you choose to use a different one. The smb.conf file is the main thing if this is only a file / print server.


Also consider if the the current server is providing other services, such as dhcp, dns, etc

You may need to check into this and be prepared to setup dhcp and dns as well.

You'll need to also have some way of regulating how much space is used by each user ( quotas ). And you will need to work out a regular backup plan to backup user files. And an entire system backup at least once after setting things up the way you need it.



Also you need a way to manage passwords. You can create the users and assign a password but the users need to change this to their own password. I'm sure there are a lot of ways to handle this problem.

Consider if this needs to be a mail server. I think it should be. I really like Open WebMail for the user interface, which requires a web server as well. If you want to support mail clients that can be done, this needs to be decided.



I would also setup a software raid mirror if you have the disk drives. This would allow the system to keep running with a bad hard drive which can be changed out during non-office hours.

What are you wanting to run in that small office?

If you are talking about your wifes office, there is a lot to consider. First they use some type of billing software, which probually runs on Windows or from a Windows server. Second, depends on the finacials of the practice they might have a computer based medical records. Which is really expensive and runs on a Windows server. My mom has worked at a couple of doctors offices and this was the case.

If you are interested in getting your foot in the door, then don't push Linux right away (especially if you are a newbie). Get to know what they need and them find the software, install it at home and get familiar with it. There are a lot of things that can go wrong and do on the first job. You know Murphy's Law. Also make sure you write up a contract. Don't get stuck like I did the first time I did a Linux server for a company.

Hopefully it will turn out the way mine did at work. We were all using dialup and I decided to bring in Linux and setup an internet connection. We went with a sat connection first on the boat and eventually got dsl, which I used wireless ethernet to connect to land. this required yet another linux box on land. It worked great. the linux box on the boat was our firewall, internet router, and dhcp server. The one on land was the internet connection for the other linux box.

I had been testing samba at home and decided that it would be great at work so I setup another box as a file server.
This one replaced windows peer to peer file sharing on our network. It also worked out really great.

Suddenly we were using Linux and it never let me down.

It's very true that it would not be a good idea to set it up before you can be sure it's going to work, and be able to support it.

At the present, the office NT4 server is being used as a back up for the files on the individual desktops. No public directory or print sharing. I do have a small network at home, on which I practice. Being retired (at 55) I can devote most of my time to learning how to set up networks and learning Linux, am thinking about buying Windows 2000 Server but like the low cost of Linux.

Is there any advantage to using DNS or DHCP in a small office with just six clients?

If there are laptops or if you wish to make things easier there is a great advantage.

No point in having to configure every client, and if more systems are added, or systems are replaced there is nothing that needs to be done.

dns is not really needed for most local networks, for internet access you can use the isp dns. this is also configured with dhcp.

I think you would need to find out more about how they backup the desktops

In a small office I would not use dhcp. Dns is nice but you could use hosts files.

Me, I would setup a file/DNS server. You can use webmin to setup the server. It will allow you to so it using your web browser. Look around for some HP jetdirect boxes (around $25 ON Ebay) and put the printer on the network and share them through a Linux box running samba. This will take the burdon off of the win 95 PCs when printing.

Don't waste your money on Win 2000 server. Use the $700 on a sever for your home. At work we have a NT server at a domain controller/DNS/WINS/file/print server and a 2000 as terminal server. The NT server is as stable as the 2000 server. Both have to be rebooted about every other week. Stick with Linux, My file/DNS server here at home has been up for 43 days with out a problem.

I have a question for this thread. It is mentioned that you should practice setting up your network at home, and learning how to admin it. My question is where to look for this information. I am planning on going to school this fall for computer networking. And I am looking for a heads up on what all an admin does. Any help would be appreciated. I have a small network <grin> a desktop and a laptop. The desktop is running Slackware 3.5 and the notebook is running Win95b.

Thanks,
DavidGlass

What an admin does depends on how big the company is that you work for. Where I work we have 5 production facilities, I don't know how many retail stores and a couple office buildings. My title is PC Tech, but I handle all but the most admin type jobs. In Missori, there are 4 admins, one does the backups and email, one does the actual OS problems for Windows, one does the actual OS problems with UNIX and the other does the security and monitoring. Then there is a admin that handles the web servers and anti-virus and mail monitoring. On handles the MRP system and so on. In a smaller organization you might have an admin and a tech or just an admin.
I would suggest learning the things that mean the most like, backups, adding users and asigning permissions (files and users), learn a progamming language (or just get familiar) and then learn the OS. The OS's that you need to learn are Win 2000/XP and a Linux with a 2.4.x kernel. Also learn Office and Open Office. The rest is on the job type stuff that depends on the business. There might be programs like AutoCAD, Photoshop SupplierTrak and such.
Trust me, most colleges teach you very little about what to do on a job. They are usually behind on technology. I had to take a BASIC (if you are old enough to remeber) programming class to complete my degree. The best thing to do is get involved some how in a networking enviorment. Try to get into helping at school on there network if you can. Get some real experience and do a lot of playing around at home. Also at school you should be able to purchase the latest Winodows and Office products for around twenty dollars each. You can also download the latest Linux at school and might be able to get a spare PC to load it on at school. Just play the game, always let your professor know that you want to learn as much as possible, even if it is BASIC.
Good luck in school.

drglass

I am also a newbie and am researching linux solutions prior to bringing it into my business environment. I cam across this web site that seems to have good information on it, although as I said I am a newbie and someone who knows much more about Linux than I do could probably tell you and I if the information is worth anything. Hope it helps.

http://linuxrefresher.com/intro/intro.htm

I learned linux through trial and error (and error and error) and once you get the basic concepts down (no C drive, D drive, etc.), it's really not that much different from Windows, (Waiting flaming posts.) There's directories, files, executables, permissions, and so on. However, I would get an older machine and grab a linux cd from any of the major distro companies. You can get a nice list of them at www.distrowatch.com. Linux does have a higher learning curve then windows, but it will be WELL WORTH IT! I moved our servers over to linux in December and haven't looked back. Our servers used to have uptimes of days, now they are in the months. (I had to shut them down once to move them to a new rack, but that doesn't count. ) Anyways, good luck! Keep coming back as there's a wealth of information here!

Travis